Wooden bricks set to sea off Denmark to track plastic waste
by AFP Staff Writers
Copenhagen (AFP) Nov 7, 2024

Some 500 wooden bricks were dropped into the waters of Lemvig in northwest Denmark on Thursday for a project aimed at mapping how rubbish moves about in the world's seas.

Hundreds of students, aged six to 19, lined up on a red carpet-lined jetty to ceremoniously throw the blocks of wood into the cold dark water.

In collaboration with other research initiatives around the North Sea, the initiative hopes to identify the movements of floating plastic waste in order to find more effective ways to reduce it.

"We just released 500 bricks together with 370 local students and it was amazing," Isa Schipperheijn, one of the project leaders, told AFP.

"Now we wait."

The pine wooden boards were chosen because they weigh about the same as the plastic that makes up around 70 percent of marine waste in the region, Schipperheijn explained.

The bricks will float around until they wash up on a beach or are perhaps caught in a net.

Some will likely end up in Denmark or neighbouring Norway, while others could travel onwards to Scotland, Germany, France or the Netherlands.

Each of them is marked with a QR code linked to the project's home page, where anyone who finds them up will be able to register them using the code engraved on each square.

The researchers estimate that around 60 percent of the boards set adrift will be found and recorded.

They say the data collected in this way will make it possible to adopt measures to channel the rubbish and prevent it from piling up.

Schipperheijn explained that while the boards would only indicate the paths that waste travels, the researchers were also carrying out parallel investigations with video cameras to find out how much plastic is clogging up the waterways.

With the help of more volunteers, up to 10,000 pieces of wood will be chucked into the water between November 7 and the summer of 2025.

"The reason that we do that... it's to involve a lot of people because we need behavioural change" and to raise awareness, Schipperheijn said.

The project is being overseen by the Danish climate centre Klimatorium in partnership with the University of Oldenburg in Germany.

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