"Oceans of Waste" – Challenges and Solutions
Against the backdrop of the INC-5 negotiations on a plastic treaty in Busan, South Korea, the Sustainability Forum 2024, held on December 3rd, focused on the issue of marine plastic waste.
Jasmin Müller from the Institute for Chemistry and Biology of the Marine Environment (ICBM) at the University of Oldenburg discussed the negative impacts of plastic waste on marine life, as well as the health of animals and humans, using her research on coral reefs in Indonesia as an example.
Dr. Christoph Tholen from the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) in Oldenburg then demonstrated how artificial intelligence can be used to analyze images from research flights, allowing for large-scale studies of the type and amount of plastic waste in the oceans.
In an interactive workshop, participants then discussed the political-legal, scientific, economic, and individual aspects of the problem and worked together to develop solutions at various workstations.
Concluding the forum with an optimistic outlook, Prof. Dr. Silke Bustamante, Co-Director of the Institute for Sustainability at the HWR Berlin, summarized that despite the lack of a concrete outcome from the recent negotiations on the global plastic treaty, much can still be achieved through local action, innovation, and regional collaboration.
