The Ocean Cleanup
A staggering 12.7 million tons of plastic enter our oceans every year. After these plastics enter the ocean they tend to aggregate together as they float on the surface of the water. This is due to the ebb and flow of the ocean’s currents. There are five offshore patches of plastic waste throughout our waterways. The largest one being the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which is currently two times the size of Texas for comparison.
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch as pictured above is located halfway between the coasts of Hawaii and California. Even though these are both United States territories the waterways between these areas are not owned by any specific country, therefore, the garbage patch is not specifically a responsibility of just the U.S.
Boyan Slat, a 24-year-old Dutch entrepreneur, conceptualized a solution to this environmental catastrophe when he was 16 years old and launched it by the time he was 18. He invented a system to gradually clean up the plastic from our oceans; this system employs plastic pipes that are shaped into a giant U, these pipes float on the surface of the ocean and are attached to plastic curtains that hang down into the water and use the oceans natural currents to corral the plastic into the device. The plan is to periodically send separate vessels with clean-up crews to collect the waste from the devices.
The cleanup system is also designed with marine animal life in mind, so it is supposed to be safe for use in the ocean and will not disturb animals who live in the ocean including simpler organisms that cannot actively move or swim.
Slat created The Ocean Cleanup organization, which is the non-profit company that created the device pictured above. This past year Slat and his team launched their first prototypes into the ocean. If everything goes as planned, they plan to release a finished and full-sized version of the device into the ocean by 2020. The Ocean Cleanup organization predicts that if their device is successful they will be able to have 50% of the island of trash known as the Great Pacific Patch within five years.
