It's a bird! It's a plane! It's a drone that loves trash!

Training the algorithm requires a lot of photos of beaches and a lot of human eyes to tag the plastic in those photos. The Plastic Tide has uploaded all the photos they've collected to Zooniverse, a citizen science portal, so anyone can go online and tag plastic. This past March, during British Science Week, the effort got a boost when students across the United Kingdom identified more than 1.5 million plastic fragments in photos. The photos were taken by 72-year-old Morris Enyeart, who has contributed more than 7,000 images to The Plastic Tide. Enyeart could have retired a couple years ago, when he sold his web design company.