SEA:CUT deploys low-cost GPS drifters with citizens to record where floating litter repeatedly stops in small urban streams, then places floating booms at those chokepoints. A source-to-sea approach descended from The Ocean Cleanup's data-driven placement, TRACKPLAST (Syros, Greece) and the Ganges "Message in a bottle" study.
Rivers deliver a large share of marine plastic, yet the transport and stalling of litter inside small urban streams is barely observed. Our pilot site, the Goejeong stream (Busan Saha-gu; 5.2 km, watershed 9.6 km²), rises at Mt. Siyak (522.7 m), runs 4.4 km under concrete cover, and discharges through the Hadan sluice into the Nakdong estuary — a site with chronic odour, stagnation and litter problems now under a ~KRW 49bn ecological restoration.
Current sample dataset (Lagrangian Monte-Carlo, seed 42, reproducible; not field data):
Trajectories CSV (1,496 rows) Hotspots GeoJSON| Field | Description |
|---|---|
| drifter_id / rainfall_mm | Experiment-unit ID · rainfall condition (15/45/80 mm) |
| t_min, lat, lon, s_km | Elapsed minutes · WGS84 position · along-stream distance |
| state | run (drifting) · beached (stalled) · sea (reached estuary) |
Firmware (ESP32 · LTE Cat.1), drift models (Python), web demos and the participant PWA are open at github.com/Itaseoul/seacut. Code MIT · data CC BY 4.0.
Ita Seoul is a Korean environmental-welfare nonprofit (est. 2018, reg. 795-82-00235, Seoul; Minister of Environment commendation 2022). We operate the Adopt-A-Beach platform caresea.kr (86 beaches, 7,002 participants, 150k+ records), the Global Adopt-A-Beach Alliance (GAA), and are a registered member of the UNEP Global Partnership on Plastic Pollution and Marine Litter (GPML). SEA:CUT aligns with SDG 14.1 and the source-to-sea framework, looking toward the 2028 UN Ocean Conference in Busan.
We welcome research collaboration (methods, drifter validation, estuary modelling), institutional partnerships and funding conversations.
Contact: cto@itaseoul.org