How to Save the Ocean?
Do you like fish? If not, you, probably, have seen other people eating it. The thing is that every time when the person consumes a product of marine life, it’s possible that he dooms himself on a slow death. This all might happen just because of a man from California who throws out his plastic bottle into the ocean, instead of putting it into the trash can.
Now, you might wonder how these two events are related. I can tell you that, unfortunately, there is a close correlation between the Californian plastic bottle and someone’s death from eating a fish. The more people put the garbage into the ocean, the faster they accelerate the growth of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (GPGP), an island of plastic three times the size of France floating between California and Hawaii, says The Ocean CleanUp website, a non-profit ocean cleaning organization.
Each year, the ocean receives 1.15 to 2.41 million tons of plastic from rivers, shows The Ocean CleanUp research. The garbage gets trapped in the circular currents, forming a gyre that floats in the ocean. Once the plastic enters the vortex, it gets stuck into its stable center and starts degrading into smaller pieces, microplastics, under the effects of sun, wind and waves, according to a National Geographic Encyclopedic Entry. It’s the point where the danger occurs.
But what’s threatening in these tiny particles? The problem is that the representatives of marine biodiversity mistakenly think that the colorful plastic parts are edible. The malnutrition and intoxication caused by the microplastics poses a danger for the marine animals’ overall existence. The problem doesn’t end here.
In the food chain, this poisoned fish might be eaten by a larger one, which will be eaten by a larger fish and so on.
About 1.8 trillion plastic pieces are estimated to flow in the GPGP, which is the equivalent to 250 pieces of debris for every human in the world, states The Ocean CleanUp research.
But wait, the information is not given to make you feel desperate about your diet. For years scientists could not come up with any convenient solution to the problem. According to National Geographic, scientists predicted that it would take centuries and billions of dollars to clean up the North Pacific Ocean, so they didn’t even try to take any serious actions, rather than preventing people from enlarging the patch. But, fortunately, times change.
It started in 2010 when the 16-year-old Dutch scientist, Boyan Slat, was scuba diving in Greece. He noticed that plastic had become a ubiquitous substance in the ocean and there were more plastic bags in the water than fishes. Slat dedicated his high school project to a deeper research of plastic in Greece.
This experience helped him to realize the scale of the pollution and invent the solution to it. His smart, yet simple idea to clean up the ocean didn’t get an initial attention even after Slat was invited to give a TEDx talk in 2012. He didn’t give up and a year later founded the non-profit entity, The Ocean CleanUp, with the starting capital of 300 euros. The organization raised $2.2 million in 100 days through a crowdfunding campaign with the help of 38,000 donors from 160 countries.
This immense success led to the initiating the engineering process as well as a series of expeditions and, finally, transformed to the recent unprecedented System 001. On the 8th of September, The Ocean CleanUp team successfully launched the System 001 into the Pacific from San Francisco. It will arrive to the GPGP area in a couple of weeks and start the cleanup process.
By now, you, probably, might wonder which concept Boyan invented to deal with the GPGP. Well, it’s based on natural forces and beautiful in its simplicity. A 600-meter-long C-shaped hollow tube floats on the surface of the water, collecting large debris, while its 3-meter-deep skirt, attached below, catches the small microplastics. The tube provides buoyancy to the system and prevents plastic from overflowing it. This smart construction is fitted with solar-powered lights, anti-collision systems and satellite antennas to track its location and gather its performance data. The floater, driven through the water by current, waves and wind, moves faster than the garbage, driven only by the ocean current.
Besides garbage collection, the system is oriented to preserve the marine life. Because of the floater’s extremely low speed the fish can escape the skirt, simply swimming away. As to the organisms that can’t actively move, the downward flow below the skirt will drive them away, while current-moved plastic will remain inside the skirt.
All-sized debris will be collected in the middle of the C-shaped system and will be transported to land every few months by a vessel, acting like a garbage truck. Then, the plastic will be recycled and made into durable products.
The Ocean CleanUp organization expect to clean 50 percent of the GPGP every 5 years. Meanwhile, the GPGP is the biggest one among five garbage patches in the World Ocean. As the System 001 reaches its full-scale deployment by 2020, the Ocean CleanUp will expand the cleaning operation to the other four garbage patches as well.
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Alexandra Khrustaleva is a third-year student at the American Univerity in Bulgaria. She is very concerned about the environmental issues, therefore it’s her responsibility to share them with people.
