The solid waste experience

October 4, 2023: Students have been colecting beach litter samples in Saint Sulpice, on the shore of Lake Geneva since 2016. This is the record of that experience. Their efforts have resulted in two manuscripts for publication that are currently in the peer review process.

The samples from these students get added to the mass of samples generated by other individuals in the region. That is over 300 samples that catalogs approximately 70,000 objects. We take an Empirical Bayes approach to predicting beach litter density by considering the measured characteristics of the sample location. In this way we avoid the double use of data for the prior and the likelihood. While generalized linear models are a good solution, we start 2023 with a scripted grid approximation.

Purpose

Demonstrate the utility and appilcability of observational data to envrironmental assessment process for managing public spaces. Beach litter data is chosen beacuse there is a rich data set of independent observations. In the region of interest there are 250 samples representing the number of objects found from a list of 230. Anthropolgists should delight. Plastics and toxicity is a peristent topic that the industry can not seem to shake. In this regard the EU has opted for the principle of precaution, establishing a recomended limit of ~ 20 piece of trash per 100 meters. Municipalities manage the resources for preventing and reducing plastics in our water, they must have a tool to aid the decision making process. This tool should be evidenve based, easy to replicate and interpret.

Financial disclosure

This is unfunded

Authors: Roger Erismann, Bhavish Patel

For information regarding the contents of this document conata analyst@hammerdirt.ch