Each year roughly 8 million tons of plastic enter the ocean damaging marine and coastal ecosystems. In partnership with Ocean Recovery Alliance, we are musing Global Alert as a tool to support organizations across 6 countries (India, Thailand, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and China). 

To address the problem of increasing marine litter flowing to our ocean, our partner Ocean Recovery Alliance announced the Global Alert platform at the Clinton Global Initiative, as an innovative, online tool and mobile app which allows users to report, rate, and map plastic pollution levels in their rivers, along ocean coastlines, and even underwater on reefs. The platform has been partly funded by the World Bank’s Global Partnership for Oceans and is also available in Spanish. The platform broadens awareness, aggregates information for decision-making, and spurs solutions to reduce plastic waste outflows via the world’s rivers or accumulation on coastlines.

Global Alert can accomplish this goal by addressing a number of issues that include:

1. Enabling community participation for reporting and problem solving

2. Catalyzing active watershed stewardship focusing on rivers

3. Providing global awareness and monitoring

By visualizing trash hot-spots on a map, along with being able to learn about best practices for cleanup and prevention programs, community groups can develop better recycling programs and plastic management strategies, ultimately leading to less floating trash making its way to the ocean. Using Global Alert, citizens and school groups can easily “See, Share and Solve” their floating trash problems. Users can upload photos of trash in their water systems or coastlines while providing information on the location and coverage area based on the volume of trash they see. Monitoring agencies and community groups can add, review, visualize and analyze their own data, as well as Global Alert data provided by the community, empowering them to make positive steps for improvements. Together we can leave a legacy of a healthy ocean, clean rivers, and engaged communities, with better waters as a result.

With your support, Global Alert can provide an innovative scalable solution that will engage, empower and change the behavior of hundreds of communities globally to make collective improvements in reducing plastic waste that makes its way to the ocean.