The MAPP Project

The Problems With Plastics

Urban plastic pollution is a hidden societal challenge. Very little research has been conducted into the flows of plastics in urban environments, urban use of plastics, and the disposal or leakage into nature across an entire city. It is, however, estimated that 13 million tonnes of plastics reaches the ocean every year from land-based sources alone. Much of this originates from urban centres before being transported to the ocean along our rivers and streams.

The current lack of city-scale data on plastic pollution means there is uncertainty about even the most basic characteristics of urban plastic pollution, including its volume, type, accumulation patterns, and relationships to other urban features. These knowledge gaps mean it is nearly impossible to create effective, data-driven solutions to even the most basic plastic problems plaguing our communities

Where does the MAPP project fit in?

The MAPP project is a collaboration between citizen scientists, community members, and academics to crowdsource the data that we consider to be missing. This involves gathering and analysing everything from the distribution, volume, and type, to the possible sources of urban plastic pollution.

The first step in achieving this has been to ask the residents of Portsmouth, UK to take to the streets in a series of 5 weekend long survey events. During these surveys, participants are asked to photograph any plastic waste that they can see, regardless of physical location or setting. When a photo is taken, the user’s location is recorded and added to the local plastics heatmap; users can also label their photos with simplistic classifications of what they’ve captured.

The next step for the project is to enhance this initial data set (photos, locations & categories) with the more in depth analysis available on the Zooniverse platform. These combined data sets will form the basis of workshop sessions with as many groups within the community as possible. During these sessions, we will be designing solutions to the issues that the data sets highlight, as well as the issues flagged up by the unique experiences of community members that can commonly be missed from purely quantitative data sets.

Why Portsmouth?

Portsmouth occupies a unique position within the geography of the UK; it is both England’s second most densely populated city after London, and its only island city. The result is a heterogeneous terrain covering dense urban areas, beaches, grasslands near the outskirts, river beds and more. In short; Portsmouth is a microcosm of all of the settings in which plastics coalesce.

The MAPP project uses Portsmouth as a testbed for the above approaches, with the intention of scaling up methods based on what is learned from Portsmouth for use in other cities in the UK and globally. As a result, we will be producing a guide and associated materials to scale up the approach for delivery in other cities and to support other groups in performing similar research.

Expected Outcomes

1. The key outcome we see from this project is to support citizens to design and take action to tackle plastic pollution in their community over and above their personal plastic use and disposal practices. We want to empower the community to take action to clean up the areas they live in.

2. The global applicability of the method developed through this project has the potential to generate a step-change in the availability of city-scale plastic pollution evidence and intervention strategies.​

3. We expect to see more effective city-scale plastic pollution reduction policies being developed and applied as a result of the improved availability of city-wide evidence. Interventions may include citizen behaviour change campaigns, working with businesses to reduce the single-use plastic reliance, or better signage on plastics recycling facilities.