The Ocean Cleanup Explained

Hello fellow WildLifers. As you may already know this month’s picked charity is The Ocean Cleanup. We have gotten many good questions about what they do and why we need it. In this article I will try to answer some of these for you. So sit back and grab some popcorn.

What is The Ocean Cleanup?

The Ocean Cleanup is a Dutch startup that works on reducing the amount of plastic in the sea.
Currently they are focusing mainly on The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a large island of trash near the Californian coast. However they hope to address more areas when their fleet gets bigger.
The project started many years ago and has seen many iterations and solutions. The current system is by far the best: A large half-circle eco-friendly net that catches surfaced plastics and piles it up. Once in a while a boat will come to pick up the piled up plastic to bring it back to shore. They call this first version System 001. This is it on a very basic level. If you want to know more there is a great video that The Ocean Cleanup made themselves.

It’s a large net, won’t that be bad for animals?

There has been some suspicion and concern raised about this. Bigger marine life such as fish and birds cannot get trapped in the net because of how relatively undeep it floats. However some people believe that on a recent screenshot taken by The Ocean Cleanup a lot of small floating water animals can be seen trapped. This was done in an early small-scaled test and real numbers have never been confirmed. These same people also argue that way more testing and sampling is needed to determine whether or not this may make a big impact on marine life.
Next to accidental catching of marine life The Ocean Cleanup has made sure that the whole system can function in bio friendly ways. The system makes use of wave currents to move and needs no generators or outside power sources to function.

Why do we need to clean the ocean?

Now I could talk hours on end about this but really it just comes down to this:
Local beach cleanup projects just won’t be cutting it anymore. The vast majority of polluted plastics are made in third world countries such as in Africa. Even if we manage to stop polluting, large amounts of plastics have already entered the ocean which eventually breaks down into microplastics that fish and other marine life will eat. Some might suffocate in them. This ultimately also affects us, as we eat fish. And I think we can all argue that having plastic in your body is not a good thing.

Can I see this in action?

Yes of course. The Ocean Cleanup is very active on social media and does frequent updates on YouTube. You can check their system in action here.

But seriously, check out their channel. They have extensive explanations on all kinds of things such as what The Great Pacific Garbage Patch actually is and how urgent the situation here is. They conducted their own research and discovered that the size of this garbage patch is almost double as big as was first suspected. Yesterday they also unveiled their machine, the Interceptor. But enough talk here, go see it yourself!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyZArQMFhQ4

I hope that made you understand a little better what this month’s charity is about. If you’re interested you can always support this charity by donating to our fundraiser over at https://wildlifecommunity.tk/fundraiser. Thank you for stopping by!