Drone will help keep Petoskey marina clean this summer
PETOSKEY — Through a partnership with the Tip of the Mitt Watershed Council, the City of Petoskey will have the use of a drone this summer to help keep the marina clean of plastic and floating debris.
City manager Shane Horn explained how the Pixie Drone will be in use during the Petoskey City Council’s meeting on Monday.
“This is remote controlled,” he said. “It will be launched here in the marina and kind of go in and out of the bays trying to pick up any sort of floating debris in and around the marina.”
Horn said the use of the drone will be provided for free.
“I really want to give (the watershed council) credit for reaching out and including us in this effort,” he said. “All the floating material, we’ll obviously bring it to shore, they’ll catalog it, kind of figure out how much debris it’s collected and then they’ll do this a few times during the season.”
Council member Lindsey Walker, who also works with Emmet County Recycling, said recycling efforts would also be made for the collected material.
“We’re going to be receiving the materials that they collect after they audit it and see if we have any opportunities for recyclability in secondary end markets,” she said.
Subscribe: Check out our offers and read the local news that matters to you
More: Meet BeBot, the robot designed to keep Northern Michigan beaches clean
The watershed council also offered the use of its BeBot beach cleaner, but Horn noted that the robot works better on sandy beaches than it would on the city’s more rocky waterfront.
“The state park I believe is utilizing that service, but we’re again fairly rocky so I didn’t see necessarily a match for that piece of equipment,” he said.
— Contact Jillian Fellows at jfellows@petoskeynews.com.
This article originally appeared on The Petoskey News-Review: Drone will help keep Petoskey marina clean this summer
