THE OCEAN CLEANUP IS HAPPENING NOW!

THE OCEAN CLEANUP

Big problems require big solutions. And, in our opinion, they require beautiful solutions.

With monstrous islands of plastic trash growing to epic proportions in our oceans, with millions of tons of plastic adding to the piles each year, ocean pollution is one of the biggest problems we face on our planet today.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is the largest plastic island. It located between Hawaii and California and currently spans over 600,000 square miles -- an area larger than the countries of France, Germany and Spain combined. It contains over 80,000 tons of plastic, according to recent research.

The Ocean Cleanup, founded by Dutch inventor Boyan Slat, is a non-profit organization, developing advanced technologies to rid the world’s oceans of plastic.

Slat founded The Ocean Cleanup in 2013 at the age of 18. He originally presented his idea at this TedX talk.

Slat dropped out of college to pursue his cleanup venture, raising $2.2 million from a crowdfunding campaign, then raised millions more via private investors. Today, headquartered in Delft, the Netherlands, his team has grown to include more than 70 engineers, researchers, scientists and computational modelers.

The Ocean Cleanup works with a passive system that moves with ocean currents - just like the plastic does. At the ocean surface, the system floater and screen concentrates the plastic refuse and leads it to a collection system. The system includes a drift anchor, suspended at about 600 below the surface, causing an intended lag, moving slower than the plastic drifts to catch it.

The screen traps garbage as small as 1 centimeter. Fish can escape the screens by passing underneath them.

Boats visit the systems at the cleanup location to collect the waste every six to eight weeks and deliver it to recycling customers.

The scale of needed cleanup is mind-boggling. Trillions of pieces of plastic drifts into our planet’s 5 main circulating ocean currents, also known as gyres, where they collect to form enormous plastic masses. Beyond the GPGP, there are plastic islands growing in our planet’s 4 other gyres: one in the South Pacific, one in the Indian Ocean, and two in the Atlantic Ocean.

The majority of the garbage is known as “ghost gear”: parts of abandoned and lost fishing gear, including nets and ropes, often from illegal fishing boats. Ghost gear kills more than 100,000 whales, dolphins and seals each year, strangling and mutilating them.

But this isn’t just a problem for marine animals. According to the United Nations, plastic pollution is conservatively estimated to have a yearly financial damage of $13 billion. And that’s not counting the impact on human health, as the plastic breaks down into microplastics, are eaten by fish, and introduce toxicity into our food chain.

But The Ocean Cleanup is up to the task. And they stand a good chance of making a significant difference.

“For society to progress, we should not only move forward, but also clean up after ourselves,” Slat says.

In preparation for full-scale deployment, The Ocean Cleanup organized several expeditions to map the plastic pollution problem in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch to an unprecedented degree of detail.

Starting in the San Francisco Bay, Slat will launch “the largest cleanup in history” this July. The first cleanup system deployment in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is scheduled to take place mid-2018.

By deploying a fleet of 60 systems, The Ocean Cleanup aims to remove 50% of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch within the next 5 years. The collected plastic will sold for recycling. Revenues will be reinvested for future cleanup efforts in the other four ocean gyres.

Slat hopes that The Ocean Cleanup can render our oceans 100% plastic-free by 2050. You can keep up with this project on The Ocean Cleanup website. And hopefully, you can help take action to get even more cleaned up, even faster.

Learn more about The Art & Science of Restoring Our Oceans and how paddle boarders are cleaning up rivers. Learn about how to Make a Beach More Beautiful. See how this Teeny Weeny Bikini Makes a Big Impact to Save Our Oceans.

Read more about Ocean Beauties in It’s Time To Visit & Save The Great Great Barrier Reef,

And check out more beautiful things happening now in BN Mind/Body, Soul/Impact, Nature/Science, Food/Drink, Arts/Design, and Place/Time, Daily Fix posts.

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IMAGE CREDITS:

1. Image: The Ocean Cleanup system pilot. Courtesy of The Ocean Cleanup.
2. Image: The Ocean Cleanup test expedition. Courtesy of The Ocean Cleanup.
3. Image: The Ocean Cleanup system. Courtesy of The Ocean Cleanup.
4. Image: by Erwin Zwart. The Ocean Cleanup is testing its plastic removal system. Courtesy of The Ocean Cleanup.
5. Image: Computer rendering of the floating trash collector. Courtesy of The Ocean Cleanup.
6. Image: The Ocean Cleanup Mega Expedition. Courtesy of The Ocean Cleanup.
7. Image: Mohd Fazlin Mohd Effendy Ooi. “Pulau Rawa.” Rawa Island. Malaysia.
8. Image: The Ocean Cleanup system deployed. Courtesy of The Ocean Cleanup.
9. Image: “Greeted by the sun on an early morning departure to our North Sea test site.” Courtesy of The Ocean Cleanup.
10. Image: Map of Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Courtesy of The Ocean Cleanup.
11. Image: First North Sea prototype. Courtesy of The Ocean Cleanup.
12. Image: Computer rendering of the floating collector of ocean cleanup system.Courtesy of The Ocean Cleanup.
13. Image: by Leonard J Matthews. “Creation.” Bribie Island. Queensland, Australia.
14. Image: by Dr. Dwayne Meadows, NOAA/NMFS/OPR. A school of yellow-tailed goatfish (Mulloidichthys flavolineatus). Northwest Hawaiian Islands.
15. Image: by Vladislav Bezrukov. “Pacific Coast.” Montara Beach. California.
16. Image: by JamesRoseUK. “Gozo - Blue Lagoon.” Malta.