The Ocean Cleanup project

https://www.facebook.com/theageAustralia/videos/10153804397751422

I recently shared a video on Facebook that one of my friends had posted on her wall about a massive plastic cleanup project. The video explains the “Ocean Cleanup” promoted by a young Australian teenager to collect all plastic waste in the ocean in 10 years. Although his ideas was proposed 5 years ago when he was 16, it was only recently that it launched a Kickstarter campaign and plans to actually implement the idea. What attracted me to the video was the simplicity of the message, the youth of its proponent, and the global impact that it would have if successful.

I am very interested in environmental issues, so the fact that a project could claim to clean all plastic garbage in the oceans was a big eye catcher. Also, given the difficulty of the task, I was surprised by the claim from an inexperienced advocate to clean it all in 10 years. ‘If it was so simple someone else would have thought about it’, I thought. And yet it made sense on a general sense, considering I have no technical expertise on the subject. I had recently seen another video with a similar concept, the Seabin. This project attempts to clean garbage in marinas through an autonomous vaccum-like small device. The fact that the Ocean Cleanup had a similar idea but several orders of magnitude larger caught my eye. It seemed realistic, at least based on the feasibility of the Seabin; ambitious -why go for a marina when you could clean the oceans?- and aspirational- we all want a cleaner world. These three elements seem to have been key in my decision to share the content, and seem to be in line with the reasons why other people share media in social networks.