Members of our team attended the Marine Litter Symposium, alongside environmental ministers from across the British-Irish Council (BIC). The Council is an intergovernmental organisation designed to improve collaboration between members on issues such as the environment, including plastic pollution. The symposium was hosted in Glasgow on 22nd February 2019 and built on the outcomes from the last summit which was held in Guernsey in June 2018. 

Together the council members have pledged to work collaboratively, with industry, to tackle marine litter in a bid to protect our seas and shorelines. A key topic was how to enhance the awareness young people have of the issue.  

Last year C5 Alliance impressed the council members when they presented their ‘Trash Tracker’ app at the BIC summit in Guernsey. Since then they have been working to develop the technology even further and have transitioned the original app to ‘Coastal Clean Up’. 

The app tracks the distribution of marine plastic along our coastline by ‘gamifying’ the collection of litter. It also provides a platform for the community to log data on our coastlines’ pollution. The developers hope to engage the community, including young people, putting school vs school and business vs business.  

‘Coastal Clean Up’ was initially developed by four C5 Guernsey bursary students and an intern at the Discover Digital internship programme run by the Digital Greenhouse. As young people themselves, these students were well placed to know what appeals to their peers. The app is currently in the testing phase but will soon be available on The App Store.  

Marc Lainé, C5 Ambassador, said: “It was a real honour to attend the BIC symposium as it is relatively unheard of for commercial enterprises to be invited to such events.  We are very pleased with the final product and hope the app will help to combat marine pollution locally and further afield. 

“Going forward we also hope to encourage partners who may be interested in investing in this development.” 

The long-term vision of the app is to gather a collection of images that can be used for training machine/ vision recognition. This will allow users to take photos of the app without having to select a category manually as they do in the proof of concept. There is also the possibility to have specific brand recognition that can pin the responsibility to a brand.