How holy turtle can turn the tide
CLEARING up plastic slicks has, up to now, been mission impossible. But off Roatan there is one possible weapon in the fightback – the holy turtle.
Based on technology used to contain and clean up oil slicks, the contrapation has a 1,000ft barrier towed by two boats which encircles the debris and tows it to shore.
The kit, dubbed the holy turtle owing to the sea creatures which become tangled in plastic, is made by American Boom and Barrier Corp in Florida. It costs £30,000 to make and £10,000 a day to use. But the results are a drop in the ocean compared to the scale of the problem. Huge plastic “gyres” have formed in biologist studying lobsters in the North Sea for her PhD in Germany, said: “What goes into the ocean can go into you.”
At a conference on Roatan she cited research that suggests that Europeans who eat a lot of seafood swallow 11,000 pieces of microplastic a year.
The main sources are microbeads in cosmetics that get washed down the plughole into the sewers and the Pacific and the North Atlantic, whipped into a vortex by powerful currents. And much of the plastic littering the oceans is too small to be seen.
The SodaStream company is leading the initiative. Its chief executive, Daniel Birnbaum, said his products allow people to make their own sparkling water at home and reduce plastic waste.
He addded: “We call it the holy turtle because it was inspired by seeing turtles tangled in plastic. It has holes in it to let animals escape.
“It will be the first time you have been able to collect plastic from the oceans. We will leave it on the island to help them tackle the problem.” out to sea and microfibres in acrylic clothing, particularly fleeces that are released in washing.
She said: “Because microplastics are so small they are about the size of plankton which eats them. So they enter the marine food chain at the bottom.
“The plankton get eaten by small fish which get eaten by bigger fish which get eaten by seabirds, dolphins and whales.”