We Won Something!

Happy days indeed! We have just received our Google Geo 4 Good Award. Look:

Our application was considered for the 2023 award period. We won the award as we use Google Maps in a number of ways to support our Charity Beach Cleaning Work.

So how do we use Google Maps?

We use Google Maps in the following ways:

Navigation

We use Google Maps to navigate to the various beaches we clean this is a fairly obvious use but if you consider the alternative of an old-fashioned paper map and describing how to get to a remote piece of coastline to a group of volunteers without the use of Google Maps you can begin to see how tricky it might be to organize a beach clean in a remote part of Scotland without the use of Google maps of course we have managed perhaps we would use a grid reference or an or a postcode or even a good old-fashioned set of directions but all of these would take a lot more organizing and likely be more prone to mishap!

Spotting Beach Plastic

Google satellite imagery can also be used for spotting large chunks of beach debris which may or may not turn out to be plastic really this is only for very large pieces of debris over 4 meters squared approximately the advantage of this however is that if there are large pieces there’s also quite high probability that there will be small pieces in the same area so it can help as an early guide to target areas for cleaning we have also managed to obtain satellite imagery from European Space Agency and their charity outreach program and this imagery is in fact not any better than the readily available imagery obtained via Google Maps.

Recording Our Finding

Again although this seems fairly obvious Google Maps is very useful for demonstrating which beaches we have cleaned and also for highlighting problematic areas from around the world we have started assembling our PAPP Map which is a Google Maps marked up with plastic pollution hotspots around the world these include rivers particularly polluted pieces of ocean eroding landfill sites and other wonderful plastic pollution sources.