Have you heard about The Ocean Clean Up (TOC)? If no, well you should have! It was founded in 2013 by a young dutch man called Boyan Slat. The company designed a completely autonomous machine that aims to collect the garbage that it encounters at sea. There have been many upgrades to the original idea. Currently, the system consists of a long floater that stays at the surface of the water and skirt that hangs beneath it. The floater gives buoyancy to the system, while the skirt prevents debris from escaping underneath and leads it into the retention system. A cork line above the skirt prevents overtopping and keeps the skirt afloat. The cool thing of this system is that it doesn't require any external energy. Position lights and other electric feature are powered by solar panels.
Video by The Ocean Clean up
Why The Ocean Clean Up project is so impressive? Well, we all know about the plastic island in the Pacific Ocean just as big as the California state and that its presence in the sea is seriously threatening the environment and therefore ourselves. An estimated 8 million pieces of plastic enter the world's oceans every day. One of the main ways trash physically travels from land into the ocean is via rivers. The Ocean Cleanup CEO Boyan Slat calls rivers “the arteries that carry waste from land to the ocean."
As a consequence, The Ocean Cleanup is working to remove garbage from our planet's rivers before it actually gets to the ocean. Recently, Slat has announced The Interceptor a new system to collect garbage from rivers.
Rivers are the primary source of ocean pollution, based on a TOC research. They estimate that about 1 000 rivers are accountable for 80% of global ocean plastic pollution. For that reason, the Interceptor was created to prevent plastic from rivers to reach the sea. That was the main reason it pushed the company to switch momentarily their focus, or better to swift their interest to rivers rather than the ocean itself.
The Interceptor looks like a catamaran, as water goes through its centre. Thanks to water current, plastic goes into a collector net-shaped which act as a filter, retaining garbage and letting water go through. The Interceptor then dump the waste into 6 on-board 'bins', with a capacity of 50 cubic meters of garbage. It's expected to collect between 50 tons and 100 tons of trash per day.
Here you can find a video taken from the Ocean Clean Up's website which shows how the Interceptor works.
As said by Slat: 'To truly rid the oceans of plastic, we need to both clean up the legacy and close the tap, preventing more plastic from reaching the oceans in the first place. [..] Combining our ocean cleanup technology with the Interceptor, the solutions now exist to address both sides of the equation." The organisation has aims to deploy an Interceptor in 1,000 of the world's most polluting rivers by 2025, which would have a huge impact in protecting our oceans from plastic.
Of course there is still a long road ahead before getting to concrete and effective results. For instance in one of their first attempts, the boom broke under constant waves and wind and it didn't retain the plastic it collected. However, what these kind of projects are good at is increasing awareness and consciousness of the plastic problem. As said by Pete Ceglinski, the Australian co-founder and chief executive of the Seabin Project: "The real goal is to stop plastics from entering the water in the first place. And we can do that using the Seabin as a powerful communication tool."
I hope you enjoyed this article!
#StayClean and live pono!
Image credit: pixabay
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