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Visitors to local beaches may see an unusual sight next summer: a large, remote-controlled electric robot slowly drifting along the beach picking up plastic and other trash. The robot is called Bebot, and The Watershed Center Grand Traverse Bay is one of two organizations in Michigan that — along with PixieDrone, a floating trash-collecting robot — are part of an effort to fight and educate about Great Lakes pollution. Publicity about the dangers of plastic in lakes.
The Watershed Center and Grand Valley State University are receiving the robots on loan from the Council of the Great Lakes Region Foundation, a $1 million donation from Meijer as part of the Great Lakes Plastic Cleanup Project. The Bebot – a joystick-operated front end originally designed to detect explosives – can easily maneuver across a variety of terrains and wears a filter that separates and collects debris from the sand. The PixieDrone works similarly in water, collecting floating waste in all forms: organic, plastic, glass, metal, paper, cloth and rubber.
The robots have been used in Canada, but the two Michigan test sites — in addition to two other Midwest locations — are the first time they’ve been deployed stateside in the Great Lakes. “This is a new tool,” said Christine Christman, executive director of the Watershed Center. “We’re trying to see how well it works and what it does and how we can improve the next versions of them. It’s a learning process to see how efficient the machines are and what they can collect. We’ll see how well they help us educate people.”
Education will be a key benefit of BeBot and PixieDrone, Chrisman says. The robots are attention-getters: As Watershed Center workers test them out in public, passersby often stop and ask what the machines are and what they do. This watershed center provides a good opening for a conversation about coastal pollution and how it enters the Great Lakes, Chrisman says — especially microplastics, which are produced when large pieces of plastic break down and are carried into lakes, choking habitats and swallowing wildlife.
“From the Watershed Center’s perspective, I see the biggest outcome[of using robots]is education and outreach,” Chrisman says. “It brings people in because it’s so cool and it’s a robot you drive. You can talk to it.” Although the machines themselves cannot solve the plastic problem, the awareness they can do can help prevent plastic pollution. One of the watershed center’s tasks over the winter is to create educational materials to be given to staff next summer, when the robots will be unveiled to the public, Chrisman said.
The Water Shed Center plans to deploy the robots at several beaches and bays, from Traverse City to Grealickville to Elk Rapids to Sutton’s Bay. “I think we want to find a lot of different situations to deploy,” Chrisman said. “I’d like to see that once the city is out of control, they’re using a different type of machine and[the robots]are picking up what they’re missing. We want to reach out to some communities that don’t often do beach cleanups and to some of the smaller lake associations. We want to see its usefulness in different areas and see if there are areas (contaminants) that we need to focus on to be more proactive.
Larger volumes of the machines can collect significant loads of waste before capacity is reached, although conventional cleaners can empty the robots multiple times to clean a beach or water. That provides another educational opportunity, Chrisman says: showing the public how much and what kind of trash is collected at local beaches and beaches. “It will take anything the size of a dime or larger: rocks, twigs, cigarette butts, goose bumps, pieces of plastic. “The goal is to go and cover a certain stretch of beach, methodically going back and forth, then lay out a plaque and sort the debris into the main types of waste.”
Technology — be it beach-cleaning robots or high-tech watershed monitoring systems — is becoming increasingly important in the environmental battle, Chrisman says. “Children’s Creek is a good example of that,” she says. “It has been on the deficient water list for years. We’ve spent millions and millions trying to restore the pieces, but we’re still seeing the same issue of missing that insect community. We need to show what could be causing this and that it is an issue that deserves attention. The Watershed Center was recently able to install monitoring systems that collect data from Children’s Creek, which shows in real time – as one example – how the watershed and different levels change the minute a water main breaks on US-31. “All this information is the only reason we get funding to do anything,” says Chrisman.
More technological advancements are likely to come to the region. “We’ve been monitoring water quality for 30 years, so one of the exciting things about new technologies and new partnerships is that we know history (where solutions are needed),” Crissman says. “For example, there is phosphorus sinking in the bay. We always wondered why it was there. We couldn’t solve it. But this technology is just around the corner; It could easily be here in the next five years. The issues we are dealing with today are very complex, they are watershed-wide systems. Such technology will be some game changer for those large complex issues affecting watersheds.
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