PortsToronto Uses Wastesharks to Keep Floating Rubbish at Bay

If I told you there was a shark in the port, you'd probably be afraid. But there's a type of shark that's helping PortsToronto keep that water waste-free. Wastesharks. Like many other urban waterways around the world, the Canadian port experiences issues with waste, with floating debris and pollution getting into the water from bins, boats, passerbys water runoffs, industry... Which is why Toronto's port authority decided to start their Trash Trapping Program in partnership with the University of Toronto. The project started in 2019 with Seabins, which help them trap plastic as well as filter and clean the water from oil and fuel. However, the port felt more was needed. They included two Wastesharks by Dutch company Ranmarine in 2023 to complement their eight Seabins. The Seabins are fantastic. They've proven to be really helpful for us and they removed hundreds of thousands of pieces of plastic debris in the harbor. But the challenge with them is that they're fixed trash trapping devices. While the Seabin does move up and down with the flow of water along a dock wall or a dock, it can't really be maneuvered to some tight spaces or go further out in the water to collect that trash. So when Ranmarine reached out to us in 2022, it was really exciting for us to add these to our fleet and give us the flexibility that we need it to, go address problem areas, go take them out maybe further away from the dock or the dock wall and capture all of the floating litter that the Seabins alone could not. Wastesharks are catamaran-like autonomous aquadrones that collect waste and biomass like algae. They are 1.57m long and 1.09m wide, with a 180-liter capacity basket between the hulls that traps the waste. The two autonomous waste collectors in Toronto, which the community named Ebb and Flow, were first deployed in the summer of 2023. They can only operate from May-June to September-October in the Canadian harbour due to the weather conditions. After seeing them in action, we could say that these devices are like the Roombas of the water. It has two electric thrusters at the rear that operate the vessel through differential thrusts, which allows for steering. And we have lithium ion batteries on board which can be recharged. We also have an onboard computer on the Wasteshark, which provides us the ability to have it work by itself in autonomous mode. It also has a Lidar and a forward facing camera. And essentially the way it works is that a user will go onto an online web-based portal, and they can monitor their vessel from there. They can create routes for us to follow, and they will follow those routes depending on what the user has specified. They can also stop and start routes, and they can view data as it comes in from the Wasteshark as well. They can work autonomously thanks to Lidar technology, which helps the aquadrones avoid obstacles and crashing. The solution also has a water quality sensor by Eureka to measure bacterial components or temperature. Although Toronto isn't using the feature at the moment. The Wasteshark sends location information to its portal Connect every second thanks to its GPS receiver, and environmental information every 10s, which allows the vessel to send alerts of thresholds being reached, or if it's in a dangerous situation. The device connects to the portal through 4G cellular connectivity. When the battery, which lasts between 5 to 8 hours, gets down to 25%, the Wasteshark goes back to what was established as its home location. For PortsToronto and the University of Toronto, one of the important things of the project is that it allows them to educate the public to stop the problem from the root. Of course, it's great to clean-up the water, but the ultimate goal is to reduce the amount of trash that goes in. So, analysis is done on what kinds of waste we're seeing. Then we work, to advocate for policies that would mitigate the waste going into the water in the first place, conduct engagement and outreach events for the public, again, to just raise awareness. In the summer of 2023, they deployed the sharks once a week. They are, however, looking to increase that for this season. Last year, with both the Wastesharks and the Seabins, they were able to collect 63,000 small pieces of plastic. Most of what was collected were pellets, film, food packaging, cigaret butts, bottles. In only three expeditions, the Wastesharks alone trapped 19.2kg of floating rubbish, among which were some 600 microplastics. At the moment, the classification of trash is manual, UofT, and port personnel log the collected rubbish into the portal. But the company is working on a feature to make that process automatic. The shark has two cameras, one facing forward to show what the aquadrone is seeing and the other inside the basket, to understand how full it is and send an alert when needed. The company is now working on implementing VisionAI on the device's front camera to identify the type of waste, so that that data is logged in automatically, but also to have Wastesharks move towards the floating rubbish, understanding what to collect and what not, as there might be something like a bird's nest in the water that it should avoid, a feature they're looking to implement in their next generation. AI is set to play a key role and be a game changer for the Wastesharks, but training artificial intelligence when it comes to water is proving quite difficult. Our challenge at the moment is, actually being able to train the vision AI model with information. Obviously you want your training material to be as closely mapped to what the Wasteshark sees itself, which means that you kind of want pictures of trash in the water from the same height and in the same sort of contexts. And we’re busy building that. I think there is a challenge around helping AI cope with dynamic situations that aren't always persistent or homogeneous. And trash in water is one of those things that can be quite random or can seem to be quite random. And it can be difficult if you don't have clear patterns to be able to train AI to deal with things that are pretty out of the ordinary. Having vision AI on the aquadrones will also open the door to not just using the vessels as waste collectors, but also as monitors of their surroundings, monitoring boats and informing of empty berthing spaces, for example. This would allow for more use cases, making the return on investment bigger for the clients. The price of a Wasteshark ranges from €23,000 to 33,000, depending on the level of autonomy. PortsToronto purchased the aquadrones thanks to a grant from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands. It's harder to focus on an economic return on investment in these types of solutions, as the main benefit is cleaning up the environment. But there are also ROIs in the shape of savings in cleanup costs, also keeping tenants, tourists and residents happy, which will increase the traffic flow of people into the port and even compliance potentially avoiding fines which, as the world registers more pollution and more microplastics in water, might become more common in the future.