How We Use Data to Tackle the Most Polluting Rivers in the World | Podcast Clip

So for me it was always going, it was kind of like going to the unknown and trying to absorb everything that was happening around me and with the river, with the plastic, with the people, understanding the problem, talking to everyone and then putting all the pieces of the puzzle together in the scientific mind and then coming back to Rotterdam with the recommendation, okay what is next? This is what I saw, this is what we collect, this is kind of the research setup because we need more information about this specific area or that specific area, so it was always new. Every time we went to a new river, oh my god, this is different than the other one and yeah, Jamaica is not the same as Dominican Republic. First thing we needed to know to support the Rotterdam team on the project was like, okay how much plastic are we seeing in this river and what is the pattern, how much is being emitted and how do we know what is the best place or the best location within this river that we can intercept and well okay, so these are all the variables that we need to take into consideration and at the time we were discovering everything and trying to find the correlations and how things work. Looking back, yeah, it wasn't always an adventure. I mean, just looking at you reminded me when we were in the Dominican Republic, first time I saw that river I was like, oh my god, so there's a lot of water hyacinths here and they're all entangled with the plastic and yeah, but how does it work with these vegetations and then how, when, why do they grow, where do they come from and then how they're being emitted, do they follow seasonality, so there was always like a question and then after a question and after a question and we're trying to find the answers that I remember there's like, okay, let's set up a sampling campaign and we need to monitor this for like a few months at least to understand a bit better the behavior and then we went sampling those water hyacinths in the bridge and it was the floating bridge almost at the river mouth and I remember when we were standing at the bridge and the bridge opened at the time and I was with a troll on my hands and two students from the university and the bridge was moving and we were there trying to sample water hyacinths and you were flying a drone and I was like, oh my god, what is going on and well, I love it, I love that because I'm curious, I'm always curious about, I like to understand things and I like to see things and connect the dots and this is part of that and it's part of that and in the end, yeah, and then I'll make all the pieces together.