“The concept was, let’s map plastics so we can stop it from entering waterways.”

Dr Laurier said one of the most surprising findings from the project was the sheer number of waste sites, with close to 3000 mapped.

“One in every five of those waste sites are within a couple hundred metres of a waterway.

“It’s incredible to see this huge amount of waste, which in the best-case scenario is getting washed away when rivers are flowing and the worse case scenario we can even see heavy machinery pushing plastics into those rivers.”

The proximity to waterways of some sites led the project team to creating a risk index for the likelihood of plastic leakage into the environment from different sites.

The Minderoo Foundation is now working with the Indonesian government to come up with solutions for plastic waste and is in discussions with other nations like Vietnam and Albania.

The foundation and governments will be able to measure their success in real-time as satellite images are updated showing whether or not dump sites have reduced.

Indonesian National Plastic Action Partnership chair Sri Indrastuti Hadiputranto said dealing with the plastic pollution problem was going to take a joint effort from the public and private sector as well as civil society.

“I believe more data-oriented innovations like Global Plastic Watch will lead us to a more sustainable policy outcome and improving collaborations in data collections in Indonesia,” she said.

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The Minderoo team expects to have the whole world mapped out for undocumented plastic waste sites later this year.

Work is also underway with Nobel Prize winner and former US vice president Al Gore to better quantify the amount of greenhouse emissions attributable to waste sites.

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