Some, however, venture much further out to tackle the gargantuan task of scooping plastic directly out of the open ocean. The majority of these inventions target pollution in rivers, down which most waste travels before reaching the seas. With everything from plastic-munching machines, to watchful drones and microplastic-dissolving technologies, they’re finding clever ways to remove plastics from the ocean – or to stop it reaching there in the first place. As it enters the food chain, it also potentially leaches toxins into animals’ bodies – with as-yet largely unknown effects on these creatures, and the humans who consume them.Īround the world, inventors, scientists and entrepreneurs are trying to innovate us out of this predicament.
It brings the risk of entanglement, and starvation (as species mistake plastics for food). In the meantime, plastic – both macro and micro – wreaks havoc on marine life. But the hardy nature of the material means that this process can take hundreds of years. Once in the ocean, plastic is broken down by the sun’s rays and by wind and waves, eventually transforming into smaller fragments called microplastics. Most plastic enters the ocean via rivers, which carry vast amounts of waste from inland sources. That’s only increased thanks to Covid-19 and the resulting surge in single-use items like masks and gloves. An additional 8 million tonnes finds its way into the ocean every year. The audio for this story was produced by Dana Cronin and edited by Natalie Winston.There’s an incomprehensible amount of plastic in the ocean – estimates put the known total at 5 trillion individual pieces, or around 150 million tonnes. In this vision, one he has held since his teens, support vessels would act like ocean garbage trucks ships would carry the plastics back to land, where they would be processed, recycled, and reused - not dumped back into the ocean. If the project succeeds, Slat's vision is to deploy a fleet of 60 more devices, projected to remove half of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch's plastic within five years. His team hopes to make the system fully operational sometime this year.
#Ocean cleanup Patch
"I'm confident that the team will be able to design appropriate solutions for this and that we'll have the system back in the patch in a few months from now." "Considering the things we have been able to prove in the past few months and considering the problems that we have faced, they seem quite solvable," he said. The other issue with the beta tester, called System 001, is that last week, a 60-feet-long end section broke off.īoyan Slat walks in front of his first prototype ocean cleanup device on June 23, 2016. It orients itself in the wind and it catches and concentrates plastic, sort of.īut as Slat, now 24, recently discovered with the beta tester for his design, plastic occasionally drifts out of its U-shaped funnel. It travels with wind and wave propulsion, like a U-shaped Pac-Man hungry for plastic. Invented by Boyan Slat when he was just 17, the barrier has so far done some of what it was designed to accomplish. Made of connected plastic pipes, the barrier was meant to catch and clean-up the plastic. In September, a 2,000-foot-long floating barrier, shaped like a U, was dispatched to the Great Pacific garbage patch between Hawaii and California, where roughly 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic have formed a floating field of debris roughly twice the size of Texas. The path to innovation is not always a smooth, straight line. Ocean Cleanup's System 001 was towed out of the San Francisco Bay on Sept.
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