Big Pacific plastics cleanup hits snag Australia

A multimillion-dollar project intended to rid the Pacific Ocean of plastic waste using a 600m floating barrier has fallen at the first hurdle.

The operation was launched five weeks ago to clear up the Pacific’s largest floating mass of rubbish, trapped by ocean currents between Hawaii and California.

However, Boyan Slat, 24, the Dutch inventor who founded the Ocean Cleanup organisation, admitted in a blog post on the group’s website that the recovered plastic had been spilling back into the ocean before it could be transferred to a ship and taken away for recycling.

‘‘We have conducted scalemodel tests and created computer models and yet this phenomenon was never observed,’’ he wrote.

The five-year goal of the project, founded by Slat when he was 18, is to collect half of the 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic in the Great Pacific garbage patch, which covers an area three times the size of France.

Ocean Cleanup is funded by substantial grants from shipping company Maersk and accountancy firm Deloitte, among others. It remains optimistic that the barrier can be made to work.

‘‘The engineering team is confident that finding a solution is a matter of time,’’ said spokeswoman Eline Weltevreede.

‘‘Since we are creating something completely new, we were expecting the unexpected.’’

The organisation had planned to build 60 replicas of its cleanup device but admits that it must now solve the problems with the first version before taking the project further.

The floating barrier is towed into position by two ships before being set adrift to be propelled by winds and currents. It has a 3m-deep ‘‘skirt’’ to catch smaller plastic particles while allowing marine life to swim underneath.

Slat suspects that the inability of the system to retain the plastic waste it rounds up is related to the unexpectedly slow speed at which it is propelled by wind and waves. To counter this, engineers will widen the mouth of the barrier by about 60m.