Great Pacific garbage patch: giant plastic trap put to sea again. Boyan Slat’s Ocean Cleanup System nicknamed ‘Wilson’ broke when first deployed, but its creator is buoyant about the second attempt to clean up the 'plastic soup'.
A floating device designed to catch plastic waste has been redeployed in a second attempt to clean up a huge island of garbage swirling in the Pacific Ocean between California and Hawaii.
Boyan Slat Ocean Cleanup OnTwitter
Boyan Slat, creator of the Ocean Cleanup project, announced on Twitter that a 600 metre (2,000ft) long floating boom that broke apart late last year was sent back to the Great Pacific garbage patch this week after four months of repair.
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A ship towed the U-shaped barrier from San Francisco to the patch in September to trap the plastic. But during the four months at sea, the boom broke apart under constant waves and wind and the boom was not retaining the plastic it caught. “Hopefully nature doesn’t have too many surprises in store for us this time,” Slat tweeted. “Either way, we’re set to learn a lot from this campaign.”
Fitted with solar-powered lights, cameras, sensors and satellite antennas, the device intends to communicate its position at all times, allowing a support vessel to fish out the collected plastic every few months and transport it to dry land.
Boyan Slat Ocean Cleanup: Restart Plastic Soup Collection
System 001/B - The Technological Challenges
The plastic barrier with a tapered three metre deep (10ft deep) screen is intended to act like a coastline, trapping some of the 1.8tn pieces of plastic that scientists estimate are swirling in the patch while allowing marine life to safely swim beneath it.
What does the ocean clean up do?
About The Ocean Cleanup
A significant percentage of the ocean's plastic drifts into large systems of circulating ocean currents, known as gyres. Once trapped in a gyre, the plastic breaks down into smaller pieces called microplastics – causing tremendous harm to marine life that mistake the particles for food.
Plastic Soup Clean Up Explanation
Trash accumulates in five ocean garbage patches, the largest one being the impact our ecosystems, health, and economies. Solving it requires a combination of closing the source, and cleaning up what has already accumulated in the ocean.
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Boyan Slat Cleanup Oceans Garbage Patches
The ocean is big. Cleaning up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch using conventional methods – vessels and nets – would take thousands of years and tens of billions of dollars to complete. Our passive systems are estimated to remove 50% of the Great Pacific Garbage patch in just five years, and at a fraction of the cost.
What is the ocean cleanup made of?
However, most packaging and fishing gear (the two primary sources of ocean plastic) is made of buoyant types of plastic (Polyethylene and Polypropylene), and most life can be found in the top part of the ocean, which is why The Ocean Cleanup focuses on the floating plastic.
Ocean Cleanup: Create A Coastline Where There is None
The challenge of cleaning up the gyres is that plastic pollution is spread across millions of square kilometers and travels in all directions. Our cleanup technology has been designed to do the hard job of concentrating the plastic first, before it can be effectively removed from the ocean.
The system consists of a long floater that sits at the surface of the water and skirt that hangs beneath it. The floater provides buoyancy to the entire system, while the skirt prevents debris from escaping underneath and leads it into the retention system, or cod end. A cork line above the skirt prevents overtopping and keeps the skirt afloat.
Ocean Cleanup By Using Natural Ocean Forces
For an area of this size, active cleanup methods would be too energy-intensive; this is why we have chosen a passive design. The cleanup systems rely on natural forces to navigate the patches – a feature that also increases its survivability in the harsh ocean environment.
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Both the plastic and system are being carried by the wind, waves, and current. However, to catch plastics there needs to be a difference in speed between the system and the plastics. Using a sea anchor to slow down the system, plastic can be retained and captured.
How much does it cost to cleanup the ocean?
At a cost of $5,000 to $20,000 per day, it would cost between $122 million and $489 million for one year. That's a lot of money and that's only for boat time. Those figures don't include equipment, disposal or labor costs and keep in mind that not all debris items can be scooped up with a net.
Boyan Slat: ‘Concentrate The Plastic And Take It Out
The combination of natural forces and a sea anchor create a drag, which makes the system move consistently slower than the plastic, while allowing the plastic to be captured.
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The Ocean Clean Up’s Expected Impact
Our floating systems are designed to capture plastics ranging from small pieces just millimetres in size, up to large debris, including massive discarded fishing nets (ghost nets), which can be tens of meters wide. Models show that a full-scale cleanup system roll-out could clean 50% of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in just five years. After fleets of systems are deployed into every ocean gyre, combined with source reduction, The Ocean Cleanup projects to be able to remove 90% of ocean plastic by 2040.
How much plastic has been removed from the ocean?
A group of ocean activists removed 80,000 pounds, or 40 tons, of plastic waste from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a massive gyre of floating garbage in the Pacific Ocean. The expedition was led by the nonprofit Ocean Voyages Institute, which was primarily interested in removing discarded fishing nets from the water
The Ocean Cleanup System Is Autonomous
Algorithms help specify the optimal deployment locations, after which the systems roam the gyres autonomously. Real-time telemetry will allow us to monitor the condition, performance and trajectory of each system.
System 001: Energy Neutral
Our systems fully rely on the natural forces of the ocean and do not require an external energy source to catch and concentrate the plastic. All electronics used, such as lights and AIS, are powered by solar energy.
Ocean Cleanup Is Scalable
The modular fleet of systems can be scaled up gradually, allowing us to learn from the field and improve the technology along the way. The more systems deployed, the faster the clean-up will be.
Ocean Cleanup handeling Vessel Traffic
No heavily-trafficked shipping routes traverse the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, so the chances of a vessel coming across an ocean cleanup system are minimal. On average only 5 vessels can be found in an area twice the size of Texas.
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But, in the event that a vessel does pass through the patch, we will implement extensive measures to ensure the safety of both vessels and our cleanup systems. Each future system of the fleet will be equipped with lanterns, radar reflectors, navigational signals, GPS and anti-collision beacons.
The AIS will continuously broadcast the location of the systems to passing vessels and the GPS will track the location of our systems, should they veer out of the patch. The US Coast Guard will chart the area as a special operations zone and will issue a Notice to Mariners concerning the presence of our systems.
The Ocean Cleanup Safeguarding Sealife
Protecting the natural environment is at the heart of what we do. It is the driver behind our efforts to remove large amounts of plastic pollution from the world’s oceans. Hence, safeguarding sea life has been the number one driver behind our technology.
For the 116 days of the first mission, a team of scientists and experts conducted extensive monitoring and observation campaigns to understand any possible environmental impact of System 001 and minimize any potential harm to marine life. Over 1045 hours of visual and acoustic monitoring were performed, and during this time no substantial interference with System 001 and the ocean ecosystem and/or marine life were observed; nor did we observe any entanglement or entrapment of marine animals or protected species.
As we continue to learn more about the technology and the natural behaviors of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, we will maintain a vessel nearby with trained observers to see how the system interacts with the natural environment. While extracting plastic, people will always be present to check for marine life before the plastic is lifted out of the water.
We have also conducted an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) for System 001 through an independent agency, CSA Ocean Sciences, which did not identify any major risks of our method to the environment.
How does plastic affect the ocean?
New studies find plastic pollution is so pervasive on many beaches that its affecting their reproduction. Hundreds of thousands of seabirds ingest plastic every year. Plastic ingestion reduces the storage volume of the stomach, causing starvation. Marine mammals ingest, and get tangled up in, plastic.
Ocean Cleanup System: Survicing Storms
Because the cleanup systems are meant to stay in the patch for long periods of time, it is important that our systems can withstand the forces of the ocean. A main component for survivability is flexibility. We designed the system to be limber enough to be able to follow the waves, and because the system is free-floating, it can drift when subjected to high current speeds.
Before you go!
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