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The country’s growing reliance on plastic is evidenced in the volume of plastic litter showing up in its oceans and other waterways and along its beaches.
The issue is especially top of mind for environmental advocates near the Great Lakes, which researchers at the University of Wisconsin estimate are the final destination of more than 22 million pounds of plastic waste annually.
Much of that waste, experts say, tends to break down into microplastics which are exceedingly difficult to detect and clean up. Exposure to them has been connected to cancer, fertility issues and developmental disorders in children.
A program launched in 2022 is taking the effort to clean up shorelines in the area into a realm of high technology. The partnership was developed by leaders at the Council of the Great Lakes Region Foundation, a nonprofit group focused on furthering environmental initiatives and sustainability projects in Canada and the U.S.
Funding from Meijer and other retailers is supporting the deployment of five BeBots and four PixieDrones along beaches in Wisconsin and Michigan. The robots, in addition to scooping up larger plastic pieces and filtering smaller ones into containers, provide data on the material they collect.
“These technologies help us learn about what’s in our Great Lakes,” said Mark Fisher, president and CEO of the Council of the Great Lakes Region Foundation. “It also helps us educate consumers and policymakers and industry about, how do we create a future without plastics in the Great Lakes?”
Meijer, the retail giant based in Grand Rapids, Michigan, was the first company to invest in the program and last year provided $250,000 to support the operations, which removed an estimated 18,000 pounds of debris from beaches on both sides of Lake Michigan. Plans for this year include using the drones along rivers near Milwaukee, as well as in the Menomonee and Kinnickinnic river watersheds.
“Our environmental impact programs directly connect with our purpose of enriching lives in the communities we serve,” said Erik Petrovskis, Meijer’s director of environmental compliance and sustainability.
Petrovskis noted that the robots are particularly useful in detecting microplastic debris, pieces of which are often too small to be seen with the naked eye. One BeBot, he said, can scour up to 32,000 square feet of lakefront beach per hour.
“They also collect water data, such as temperature, pH and salinity, to help our project partners interpret the conditions in the water,” he said.
The program has produced results promising enough that leaders are considering expanding operations into Indiana, including the 45 miles of Lake Michigan shoreline on its northern beaches.
“There are emerging technologies happening all the time,” said Betsy Maher, executive director of Save the Dunes, a nonprofit organization that helped establish what is now Indiana Dunes National Park. “A lot of conservation work, for example, is done through mapping, and there is great potential for helping us do our job better, including the beaches in Northwest Indiana.”
Fisher said he and other Council of the Great Lakes Region Foundation leaders have had preliminary discussions with Save Our Dunes officials and other groups about deploying BeBots in the area, but corporate and civic support will be needed for the project to come to fruition.
“If we can find the right partners in corporate funding or other sources of funding, we’re certainly looking for other local sites and beaches where we can operate this technology, including Indiana,” he said.
Workers at Indiana Dunes National Park near Michigan City use a drivable cleaning machine to help de-litter the park’s largest beach. Volunteers perform beach cleanups regularly, and the park’s eastern beaches use a carry-in, carry-out policy.
Although they’re mostly satisfied with the overall effectiveness of those measures, park officials agreed that the drone and robot technology is worth exploring.
“The leadership is always interested in looking for new more efficient and more effective ways to clean the beaches and the whole park, for that matter,” said Bruce Rowe, a supervisory park ranger at Indiana Dunes National Park. “It’s something that we at least would want to explore more to see if that would be something that would work for us.”
Concern has been expressed by some advocates that employing the devices could lead to a decline in participation in cleanup and conservation efforts on the region’s beaches. But Fisher said the intent of the program has never been to replace human involvement and environmental responsibility.
“There’s no way that technology on its own that’s going to solve the problem,” he said. “They’re great at cleaning portions of beaches and marinas and things like that, but at the end of the day, the only way we’re going to keep the Great Lakes free of plastics is if consumers and beachgoers and people in natural spaces are not littering.”
