Since 2010, researchers at the University of the Azores have been monitoring waste brought in from the sea, until they began noticing the same objects appearing again and again.
"We started to realise that these items, which at first we did not know where they came from, had certain numbers on them. And when we started to find quite a lot, we began trying to look up what they actually meant," explains Christopher Pham, researcher and head of the marine litter research group at the University of the Azores.
