Build your own trackable drifters from recycled plastic bottles, release them at river bottlenecks and see exactly where trash gets stuck, giving your community the evidence it needs to stop river litter before it reaches the sea.
Friendly Floatee takes its name from a famous accident. In 1992, a container of 28,800 plastic bath toys, known as Friendly Floatees, fell into the North Pacific. Oceanographers Curtis Ebbesmeyer and James Ingraham tracked where the toys washed up and used the finds to improve their models of ocean currents.
Friendly Floatee applies the same idea to rivers, using drifters you can track live and recover.
Ita Seoul publishes everything under an open licence: component blueprints, the bill of materials (a full parts list), data specifications and the forms you need to coordinate with local authorities. Kits come in different cellular tiers, so you can match devices to your budget and mobile coverage.
Each observation feeds a shared, standardised data model, so data from your river lines up with data from every other river in the network. Alongside the bottleneck map, the team analyses “residence time”: how long trash lingers in each section before moving on.
The project supports three UN Sustainable Development Goals: Clean Water and Sanitation (6), Sustainable Cities and Communities (11) and Life Below Water (14).
Time:
One 2 to 3 hour river session roughly every two weeks for three months (six sessions in total), plus a build day and a safety training session beforehand.
