Latest Updates on The Ocean Cleanup
With the help of a team of scientists and engineers with 400 years of combined experience in offshore engineering, Boyan Slat’s clever idea to remove plastic from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is becoming a reality.
Five years of research and tireless effort have led to this moment, and System 001 is a go.
Here’s a quick recap of what they’ve accomplished so far, and what’s been happening most recently.
Milestones to Get Here
In short, The Ocean Cleanup’s path to now:
- 2013: Captured the attention of the world with artist renderings of the innovative concept.
- 2014: Crowd funded $2.2 million from 38,000 people from 160 countries.
- 2015/16: Performed extensive research of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch from the air and the sea.
- 2016: Tested a prototype in the North Sea.
- 2017: Iterated the design to be free-floating rather than anchored to the ocean floor.
To learn more about the research phase and initial design, check out this previous post. And to learn about the crucial design pivot that led to the design of system 001 (now catching plastic in the Pacific!), click here.
And Now, the Latest
Before deploying system 001 into the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, The Ocean Cleanup team towed the system out a shorter distance into the Pacific off the coast of San Francisco.
Their goal: to test for the five key elements above.
After the two week trial, the team made the decision that the technology was sufficiently ready to be towed out the remaining way to the garbage patch.
Currently, the system has been deployed and is accompanied by a monitoring vessel seeking to understand how it’s behaving and how it can be optimized to work to it’s fullest potential.
While the system is successfully capturing some plastic, it is also losing some of the plastic that it captures. This is the key problem The Ocean Cleanup is now working to solve.
Click here to view a video update from technology manager Arjen Tjallema about what’s happening out there and what’s to come.
Act on Climate
From the beginning, The Ocean Cleanup has been clear about the need for a two-pronged approach to solving the plastic problem. Capturing plastic that’s already in the ocean and stopping more plastic from entering the ocean in the first place. Learn more about the organizations behind this work, and how you can support them at PlasticPollutionCoalition.org
