By Hugo Barcia
New Delhi, Sep 6 (EFE).- India’s rivers, clogged with plastic waste and debris forming the world’s largest shares of marine pollution, are now being cleaned thanks to a blend of low-tech barriers and high-tech artificial intelligence.
As plastic wrappers, bottles, and waste carrying a pungent odor spill into the sea, an Indian entrepreneur has deployed more than 30 floating barriers nationwide, capable of collecting up to 22,000 tons of waste annually.
«I was a merchant navy captain, and I remember somewhere in Europe seeing a clean river, and I wondered, ‘Why not in my country?’ I thought one day I will play a role in cleaning what was in my country,» said D.C. Shekar, director of AlphaMERS, the brain behind the ambitious project to clean India’s rivers.
Almost three decades after that initial thought, 34 floating barriers designed by Shekar are now installed across rivers near 10 Indian cities, intercepting tons of waste daily.
In Chennai alone, 22,000 tons of garbage were removed from a river in just one year.
Around “10 percent” of what the barriers catch is plastic, said Shekar, adding that, on occasion, they have also collected items like sofas or even cattle carcasses.
Shekar’s award-winning design is both simple and innovative: an aluminum mesh submerged 40 centimeters below the surface with 10-centimeter-wide holes, specifically engineered to trap floating debris.
The key to the design lies in its diagonal placement in the river, which reduces the water’s force, preventing the mesh from breaking or flipping.
The current naturally carries the waste toward the shore, where municipalities can collect it.
“We always select cities where the (end) of the barrier is close to a road, so trucks can come easily (to access the location),” Shekar said, highlighting the project’s scalability and ease of replication.
The barriers, which average between 70 and 80 meters in length, cost around $30,000 to install. The largest ones, however, stretch up to 160 meters.
Awareness Gap India, with its population of over 1.4 billion, is one of the world’s largest consumers of plastic. Coupled with a lack of environmental awareness, this has led to enormous amounts of waste ending up in rivers A 2021 article in Science Advances identified India’s rivers as the second-largest contributors to marine pollution globally, releasing 126,513 million tons of waste annually, behind only the Philippines.
In 2022, the Central Pollution Control Board reported that more than half of India’s 605 analyzed rivers were polluted.
Despite a 2022 ban on single-use plastics, there is a widespread presence of plastic waste throughout the country, including in the capital.
In August, the Supreme Court expressed serious concerns about the levels of plastic waste in rivers, warning that it is causing «severe environmental degradation.»
Artificial Intelligence to the Rescue To help tackle this issue, Shekar’s company recently partnered with the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) to develop an AI-powered algorithm capable of identifying plastic hotspots in India’s rivers. This technology will help determine optimal locations for installing the barriers.
Currently, most of the barriers are deployed in southern India, in the states of Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, and Telangana. However, they have also been placed in northern regions and in the western state of Goa, where Shekar confirmed an agreement with the regional government to expand the project throughout the state.
With ISRO’s satellites now involved, the space agency will scan the waste trapped in the barriers to identify which debris is plastic and which is not. This will ultimately help pinpoint the main sources of plastic pollution in India’s waterways. EFE
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