EccoDrone Uses AI Drones to Clean Up Our Beaches

Lake Michigan looks calm from a distance, but the sand tells a different story. A group of students who spend their free time around the lake noticed something that could not be unseen once spotted. Trash everywhere. Cigarette butts half buried in the sand, plastic packaging drifting toward the water, glass bottles waiting for the next wave.

According to Earth911, this debris does not stay put. It moves into the water, into animal habitats, and eventually into digestive systems.

Surfers Against Sewage reports that one out of every three fish consumed contains plastic, and more than 100,000 marine mammals die each year because of plastic ingestion. That is not background noise. That is an alarm.

Instead of looking away, these students looked up, literally, and sent a drone into the sky.

From Hiking Trails to Autonomous Flight

The spark behind EccoDrone did not come from a lab or a whiteboard session. It came from a hiking trip through Vermont’s mountain ranges, where trash scattered along trails quietly erased the illusion of untouched wilderness, as reported by BlueDotLiving.

The experience raised a blunt question. If humans are the source of the damage, can technology be used to reduce it without adding more harm?

That question became EccoDrone, a nonprofit project focused on using autonomous drones with ai and computer vision to detect trash in natural environments.

What started as an idea to monitor litter on trails quickly expanded into a broader system designed for beaches, parks, and protected areas, all without disturbing the spaces it observes.

Rather than sending more people into sensitive environments, EccoDrone sends a drone, collects the data, and lets cleanup crews work smarter instead of harder.

How EccoDrone Actually Works

At the core of EccoDrone are two tightly connected systems. The drone itself and the trash detection software.

The drone flies autonomously using waypoint based navigation, supported by obstacle avoidance to ensure safe operation. Operators set GPS waypoints along beaches or park trails, and the drone follows those routes on its own, recording video the entire time. No joystick flying. No guesswork. Just repeatable, consistent data collection.

Once the flight is complete, the footage is sent to EccoDrone’s trash detection software. This is where things get interesting.

The software is trained using real world footage manually labeled by the EccoDrone team. Trash items are highlighted frame by frame, teaching the system what to look for and what to ignore. The dataset includes more than 50 types of trash captured from over 300 different angles, covering everything from plastic bottles to food wrappers to items partially buried in sand or leaves.

After training, the software processes new flight footage and flags trash locations across the surveyed area. That data is then shared with partner organizations, allowing them to plan cleanups with precision instead of relying on volunteers wandering around hoping to stumble onto problem spots.

In short, the drone scouts. The software analyzes. Humans clean.

Testing, Results, and Real World Impact

EccoDrone is currently in its testing phase, and the early results are promising. The system correctly identifies around 80 percent of trash items, with an incorrect detection rate of roughly 5 percent. For an early stage nonprofit project built by students, those numbers are not just respectable, they are impressive.

The team continues to improve the model through ongoing training, expanded datasets, and feedback from real cleanup operations. With additional support from sponsors and partners, EccoDrone aims to push accuracy higher while scaling operations to cover larger areas more efficiently.

The project has already partnered with beach cleanup groups and park management organizations around the Chicago area, helping them reduce time spent surveying and increase time spent actually removing trash from the environment.

This is not a drone chasing a buzzword. It is a drone solving a boring, stubborn, very real problem.

The Mind Behind the Mission

EccoDrone was founded by Inika Bansal, a high school student at Walter Payton College Prep with interests that sit right at the intersection of engineering and environmental conservation. As a sailor and hiker, she has seen environmental damage up close, not as statistics, but as litter underfoot and debris in the water.

With a focus on mechatronic engineering, Inika created EccoDrone to support existing nonprofit organizations rather than compete with them, using drone technology as a force multiplier for environmental cleanup efforts.

EccoDrone by the Numbers

So far, the impact looks like this.

1,600 trash items detected, 75 students educated, $10,500 utilized, 1,200 acres surveyed, 20 volunteers involved and 32 kilometers flown.

For a student led nonprofit, that is not a side project. That is momentum.

DroneXL’s Take

EccoDrone is a reminder that drones do not need to deliver packages, chase suspects, or film cinematic sunsets to matter. Sometimes the most meaningful drone missions are quiet ones, flying low over beaches and trails, spotting the mess we pretend not to see.

This is what responsible drone use looks like. Purpose driven, data focused, and built to support people doing real work on the ground. If more drone projects followed this path, the skies would be a lot more useful, and the beaches a lot cleaner.

Photo credit: EccoDrone