Chris Wilcox on measuring marine debris and its impact on sea life in Australia
Taking a keen interest in the data is Chris Wilcox, a senior scientist with the CSIRO's marine and atmospheric division.
"My role is really to do the analysis of the data that's coming in," he said.
"So both trying to analyse the beach survey data to understand things like what's the effect of having a recycling bin on a beach in terms of how much rubbish is on the beach.
"And then I'm also doing the oceanographic modelling... to understand how ocean currents then transport rubbish that's out in the ocean to the beach.
"If we know it's on the beach we can make a prediction about what's out in the ocean."
Mr Wilcox says collecting biological data is expensive so they are taking to the skies to get more information.
"A person can only really observe a two-metre swath. If we take this little helicopter and fly it above us and take a photo of that beach, we then can try to identify rubbish in that photo and for one little two-metre swath that we actually walked, we know what's there and so we can sort of standardise what's in the photo," he said
"So it allows us to expand our capacity to observe what's in the environment by orders of magnitude."