Cleaning up the oceans!
By Idelle, December 9, 2014
When I see stories like this, it gives me hope for humankind!
20-year old Boyan Slat has a great plan to help clean up the oceans – by deploying devices that will gather up all the plastic that is plaguing our oceans to be stored and ultimately recycled. What a brilliant idea! Now if we can only reduce our use of plastics drastically, and cease polluting our planet!
Here is some information from theoceancleanup.com on what this is all about:
The Plastic Pollution problem:
- Millions of tons of plastic have entered the oceans (UNEP 2005)
- Plastic concentrates in five rotating currents, called gyres (Maximenko et al., 2012)
- In these gyres there is on average six times more plastic than zooplankton by dry weight (Moore et al., 2001)
The Solution:
- It is of course essential to first close the tap, to prevent any more plastic from reaching the ocean in the first place.
- However, this will not be a solution for the plastics already trapped in the currents of the gyres.
- The Ocean Cleanup works to develop world’s first feasible method to clean the gyres of plastic, using the currents to our advantage.
- Extraction: Why move through the oceans, if the oceans can move through you? An array of floating barriers first catches and concentrates the debris, enabling a platform to efficiently extract the plastic afterwards. We have now proven The Ocean Cleanup Array concept is likely a feasible and viable method to remove almost half the plastic from the North Pacific Garbage patch in 10 years, while being an estimated 7900x faster and 33x cheaper than conventional methods. The Ocean Cleanup now works towards a large-scale and operational pilot in 3-4 years’ time.
- Read more about this brilliant solution at: theoceancleanup.com