National Geographic and Sky Ocean Ventures have launched the Ocean Plastic Innovation Challenge, seeking innovative approaches towards tackling the plastic pollution calamity. The one year challenge is open to everyone and focuses on three types of strategies to combat the growing problem, from creating new food and beverage packaging, closed-loop solutions and communicating the increasingly dire issue.

The Ocean Plastic Innovation Challenge is part of National Geographic’s Planet or Plastic? campaign, an initiative that seeks to raise awareness of the plastic crisis and reduce the amount of single-use plastic pollution in the world’s oceans. In addition to the challenge, National Geographic also funds projects that investigate how plastic moves through watersheds and solutions to keep plastic from ending up in the ocean, as well as providing classroom resources to educators.

The challenge consists of three tracks teams may compete in—Design, Circular-Economy, and Data Visualization. The design track incentivizes teams to create solutions to food and beverage packaging, as well as a “wild card category” for packaging solutions that don’t fall within food or beverage categories. The circular-economy track seeks business models and technology that facilitates businesses and consumers to create scalable solutions that encourage the reuse and repurposing of alternatives to plastics. The final track “challenges teams to represent a relevant, credible data set related to the global challenge of plastic waste as data visualization.”