Meet Sea Gull, private eye. Garbage-loving gulls in Spain fitted with GPS trackers led researchers to an illegal waste dumping site.
High taxes on landfilling in Europe have led to a black market for waste disposal, says Jim Baird at Glasgow Caledonian University. In the UK, the cost of illegal dumping to taxpayers runs to at least £300 million, according to a 2014 report by the Environmental Services Association Education Trust.
Illegal dumping can be hard to spot because the perpetrators are often white-collar criminals who create what looks like a law-abiding company. In Italy, the Mafia also has a hand in the covert dumping business.
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So Joan Navarro tried an unconventional way of finding these operations. He and colleagues at the Functional Ecology and Evolutionary Center – part of the French National Center for Scientific Research – took 19 yellow-legged gulls and fitted them with solar-powered GPS trackers that transmitted the birds’ locations every 5 minutes.
Trash trackers
The gulls ranged over 100 kilometres from their colony with the GPS tracking them. Five gulls kept returning to a spot at a closed landfill near the Spanish city of Huelva. When the researchers took a look for themselves, it turned out that fresh waste had been dumped there illegally.
“[It’s] certainly an innovative approach to use scavenging seagulls as a tracker for sites where waste has been disposed of, legally or otherwise,” says Baird. “The GPS technology is probably one where costs will fall and tracking will become straightforward.”
The solar power source for the trackers allows them to stay on the birds for years, and their frequent location updates could let managers watch for new illegal dump sites in real time.
Gulls can only find organic waste – electronics, toxic substances and other inorganic objects don’t smell like food, even to scavengers. To watch for these other kinds of waste, researchers can use satellites to detect changes in landfills’ appearances and flag suspicious activity, says Baird.
Journal reference: PLOS One, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0159974
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