Navtek launches autonomous litter drone

The company’s new Lautrus drone, which can be operated semi or fully autonomous, can also be used to clean up oil spillage and other organic waste with a different collection module.

It also has a self-emptying system, which deposits collected litter into a waste receptacle.

Lautrus is fully autonomous but can also be controlled by a mobile app or remote-control station.

It can be customised and equipped with different kinds of sensors for water quality monitoring and control, and because it is silent it will not disturb marine life, the company says.

“Rivers constitute critical pathways of transport of litter from land into the sea,” says a 2022 report by the European Environment Agency. “Over 600 million floating items, corresponding to almost 3,400 tonnes of litter, are discharged by European rivers into the sea annually. The Mediterranean Sea receives the largest fraction of discharged litter.”

The report Marine Litter in Europe An integrated assessment from source to sea says that plastic packaging is the largest demand for plastic production and up to 2018 it had been increasing steadily.

“In the EU-27, per capita generation of plastic packaging waste is increasing, even at a faster pace than the Gross Domestic Product,” it says. “Such an increasing trend is not in line with the policy goal of preventing waste.”

According to the WWF, it can take 450 years for a single plastic bottle to break down in water.