WHAT TYPE OF PLASTIC IS THIS?
The Philippines has a bad reputation when it comes to plastic pollution. The country tops the rankings as the world’s biggest polluter, contributing 36 percent of total plastic waste emissions into the ocean globally, according to a report from the UK in 2023.
However, for those trying to understand the plastic waste problem in the region, the difficulty is the lack of data to carry out calculations.
“The Philippines is considered to be one of the big contributors to plastic pollution. But we always come back to the fact that there is no hard data on this,” said Dr Deo Florence Onda, a microbial oceanographer from the University of the Philippines.
“There is no basic data from the Philippines. And many of the classifications are mainly based on statistical calculations alone,” he said.
According to Onda, developing countries have been forced to take responsibility and be blamed for plastic pollution. In fact, he said, responsibility should be shared, including by plastic producers.
Since 2022, Onda has spearheaded Plasticount Philippines – an effort to create comprehensive baseline data on the presence of plastic in the country, what types it is and how much. He believes this science-based approach can provide better information in decision making regarding alleviating the plastic waste problem.
But counting the amount of plastic in the country with the world’s fifth longest coastline is not an easy task. Manual and conventional methods “would be very toxic and incredibly difficult,” Onda said.
“The idea now is to use technology to help increase our research capacity, and that’s where the use of AI and machine learning comes in. Combined with drone technology and high-resolution imaging systems, AI helps us quantify plastics and microplastics,” he said.
In carrying out the daunting task of collecting plastic data nationwide, a research team in the Philippines used AI technology developed in Japan to collect, identify and visualize the problem.
To do this, the Philippines must first adapt AI capabilities to the local context. The reason is that according to Paul Samuel Ignacio, professor of mathematics at the University of the Philippines Baguio and member of the Plasticount team, the plastic problem in the Philippines is different from that faced by Japan.
“AI is trendy right now, everyone wants to use it. But then everything depends on data, right? So imaging data is needed to train AI, or we won’t get a good model,” he said.
