The Watershed Center Grand Traverse Bay is helping clean up plastic on the beaches and in the bay. They have two robots, Beach robot Bebot and Water robot Pixie Drone.
“It has a catchment and it catches anything above a certain size,” Flynn House, Intern said. “So, we can take data on what kinds of plastics and waste that we’re finding in our waters. In The Great Lakes.”
These robots are apart of a statewide research project.
“The Great Lakes Plastic Cleanup is an initiative to reduce plastic entering our Great Lakes, our Bebot, our beach robot, it has a catchment on the back where I dig through the top six inches of sand. And there’s a catchment, anything above a certain size is in the bag. So, it’s not necessarily getting microplastics, but it’s getting a lot of the larger fragments and cigarette butts and stuff like that that do end up breaking down into microplastics.”
House takes Bebot and empties the findings onto the sand. She sorts through to find what plastic was left on the beach. She then conducts research on what she found.
“With our Pixie Drone, our marinas are really clean,” House said. And I think that’s testament to how a lot of boaters and people care about what they’re doing to their lakes. They want to enjoy it, and they don’t want to litter. They don’t want to make it messy for everyone else. With our Bebot, it changes depending on the beaches that we’re at.
“For instance, beaches that aren’t groomed, such as the State Park,” House said. “Or something like that is going to have a lot more plastic because the groomers don’t come to pick it up. And more beaches with playgrounds will have toys and toy fragments, whereas features that are a little bit out of the way or something like that, or just more urban end up with a lot of like cigarette butts and just hard fragments in general, is what we find most fun.”
House has a message for anyone who uses the beach or heads out on the Lake.
“I would say just pick up after yourselves. A little thing that flies away that you don’t think are a big deal, that break down and enter our waterways and sand our beaches. And this is about preserving our waters and Great Lakes and beaches for future generations. I think this is a really pertinent issue now that a lot of people need to pay attention to and need to be active about, especially because your little piece of trash does make a difference, especially when everyone leaves a little piece of trash. And if everyone picks up their trash, then we end up with a much healthier watershed, and our future is much better.”
To find out more information click here for The Watershed Center Grand Traverse Bay website.