Marine Plastic Sorting

Opportunity Statement

Ocean Legacy is seeking a solution to improve the accuracy, consistency, and efficiency of manual sorting and quality control of marine plastic waste, including large and irregular items such as ropes, fishing nets, barrels, traps and pots, and small plastic fragments. The organization is interested in tools (such as computer-vision and AI-enabled tools) that can support human decision-making and quality assurance in a non-conveyor, hand-sorting environment.

Context

Ocean Legacy operates marine plastic recovery and recycling facilities in British Columbia and Nova Scotia, Canada which process plastic waste recovered from coastal clean-ups, aquaculture, fisheries, and marine industries.

Unlike conventional material recovery facilities, Ocean Legacy’s feedstock is highly heterogeneous, irregular in shape and size, and often degraded due to saltwater exposure, UV damage, and organic contamination. Much of the sorting is conducted manually due to the presence of bulky and flexible items (e.g., ropes and nets) and relatively low, variable volumes of smaller fragments.

Ocean Legacy currently uses basic resin identification tools (e.g., spectrometry) but is exploring whether more advanced approaches could improve sorting accuracy, reduce contamination, improve data collection, and strengthen downstream pellet quality.

Response Criteria

Core functional requirements:

• Operate in a manual or workstation-based sorting environment (not reliant on conveyor belts).
• Support human sorters through real-time or near-real-time decision support, classification, or quality-control feedback.
• Handle irregular, degraded, and marine-exposed plastics (salt, fouling, UV damage, mixed colors, weights and shapes).
• Improve consistency and accuracy of polymer identification and/or contamination detection. 

Technical considerations:

• Compatibility with static or flexible camera setups at sorting stations.
• Ability to function in an industrial recycling environment (dust, variable lighting, moisture).
• Clear approach to model training and adaptation to marine plastic waste streams.
• May need to function in remote environments with limited power and internet access.
• Potentially be portable to assist with sorting material in an outdoor working receiving/storage yard.

Implementation considerations:

• Readiness to pilot in an operational facility.
• Ability to integrate with existing manual workflows without major infrastructure changes.
• Willingness to collaborate on adapting models to a novel waste stream.

The Opportunity

This challenge presents an opportunity for providers to:

• Co-develop and validate new applications for marine plastic waste, an under-served but growing recycling segment.
• Generate operational data linking feedstock characteristics to pellet quality and end-market performance.
• Establish a reference case for applying advanced sorting software in low-volume, high-complexity recycling environments.
• Demonstrate how AI-enabled vision systems can extend beyond traditional conveyor-based sorting into complex, real-world manual operations.

About Ocean Legacy Foundation

Ocean Legacy is a Canadian non-profit organization dedicated to preventing plastic pollution and advancing circular solutions for marine plastic waste. The organization operates recovery and recycling programs for plastics collected from shorelines, waterways, and marine industries, with a focus on diverting difficult-to-recycle materials from landfill and waste-to-energy pathways and returning them to productive use where possible.

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