A young inventor sets out to clean up trash in the oceans

There’s a lot of plastic trash in the world’s oceans. Plastic waste, millions upon millions of tons of it, continues accumulating in five giant ocean garbage patches. If left to circulate on its own, plastic waste will carry wreaking havoc with ecosystems, as well as affecting human health.

But now a Dutch foundation is planning to do something about all that waste by attempting to pull off what it bills “the largest cleanup in history.”

The Ocean Cleanup Foundation, the Dutch non-profit, has just sent a giant free-floating device on its way to the Pacific Ocean. Setting out from San Francisco in early September, the 600m-long structure with a U shape is now being towed towards the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a vortex of trash created by winds and currents. It’s the largest garbage patch in the world, located between Hawaii and California. Once there, the device will set about trapping some of the estimated 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic in the giant garbage patch.

The concept for the cleanup was designed by Boyan Slat, a 24-year-old innovator from the Netherlands who founded Ocean Cleanup after seeing more plastic rubbish than fish during a scuba-diving trip in the Mediterranean Sea when he was 16. He began thinking of ways to red the oceans of much of that floating garbage.

The result is an innovative cleanup system that has been fitted with solar-powered cameras, sensors and satellite antennas so it can continue communicating its position in the months ahead to a cargo ship that will swoop in every so often and pick up all the plastic rubbish that the device collects.

Once collected, the retrieved plastic waste will be shipped back to land in order to be recycled. One main concern is whether the device will be able to withstand harsh weather conditions, such as turbulent waves.

The cleanup effort doesn’t come cheap. The foundation has raised $35 million for the project in donations from the likes of Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel. According to plans, a total of 60 free-floating barriers will be deployed in the Pacific Ocean by the year 2020.

Slat says we have no time left to waste if we are to ensure that plastic waste does not end up polluting our seas and oceans to even more extreme levels. “The plastic (waste) is really persistent and it doesn’t go away by itself and the time to act is now,” the young environmentalist told a news agency. “One of our goals is to remove 50 percent of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in five years,” he added.

Two years ago when the foundation surveyed the extent of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch from the air, even experts were taken aback. “[The] first-ever aerial survey of floating ocean plastic provided confirmation of the abundance of plastic debris sized 0.5 m/1.5’ and up,” the foundation explained on its website. “While the flight plan took us along the Northern boundary of the patch, more debris was recorded than what is expected to be found in the heart of the accumulation zone. Initial estimates of the experienced observer crew indicate that in a span of 2.5 hours, over a thousand items were counted.”

In other words, the density of rubbish was higher than it had previously been estimated. And much of it was clearly visible to the naked eye when observed from a bird’s-eye view. “It was bizarre to see that much garbage in what should be pristine ocean,” a member of the team observed.

The accumulation of floating waste into five large swirling swathes in the oceans has led to a growing environmental crisis around the planet. These giant gyros of plastic waste are constant reminders of people’s wanton pollution of the Earth. They also pose an imminent danger to marine life. Animals can get entangled in various bits of plastic or else swallow them.

Recently, for instance, scores of beached whales were found to have large quantities of plastic in their stomach. Untold numbers of birds, turtles and fish have likewise suffered from the extensive – and growing – amounts of plastic trash in the world’s seas and oceans.

And it’s not as if we’ve done polluting our planet. Rather, we keep dumping yet more plastic into the seas, and vast quantities of it. At this rate, according to the World Economic Forum, by 2050 there will be more plastic in the oceans than fish.

Now consider this: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch alone has been estimated to take up as much as 15 million square kilometers. Its dense heart of waste is the size of around 1 million square kilometers. In fact, according to the UN, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch has grown so vast that it is becoming visible from space.

The pieces of plastic trapped in such floating patches of waste range from tiny microbeads to large objects. “Most of the debris [we observed] was large stuff,” a member of the Dutch surveillance team noted at the time. “It’s a ticking time bomb because the big stuff will crumble down to micro plastics over the next few decades if we don’t act.”

Creative scientific solutions like this and technologically advanced tools will be essential as we set about cleaning up the mess we’ve made in the world’s oceans. “Our passive cleanup units are designed to capture virtually any type of debris,” the foundation explains. “Models show that by utilising vast rotational ocean currents, cleanup systems with a combined span of 100km can harvest almost half the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in 10 years.”