Massive boom hopes to corral Pacific’s plastic
Engineers set to sea at the weekend to deploy a trash collection device to corral plastic litter floating between California and Hawaii in an attempt to clean up the world’s largest garbage patch in the heart of the Pacific Ocean.
The 600-metre long floating boom was being towed from San Francisco to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch – an island of trash twice the size of Texas.
The system was created by The Ocean Cleanup, an organisation founded by Boyan Slat, a 24-year-old innovator from The Netherlands who first became passionate about cleaning the oceans when he went scuba diving at age 16 in the Mediterranean Sea and saw more plastic bags than fish.
Slat said that researchers with his organisation found plastic going back to the 1960s and 1970s bobbing in the patch.
The buoyant, U-shaped barrier made of plastic and with a tapered 3m deep screen, is intended to act like a coastline, trapping some of the 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic that scientists estimate are swirling in that gyre but allowing marine swim beneath it.
Fitted with solar power lights, cameras, sensors and satellite antennas, the cleanup system will 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 where it will be recycled.
Shipping containers filled with the fishing nets, plastic bottles, laundry baskets and other plastic refuse scooped up by the system being deployed Saturday were expected to be back on land within a year, he said.
Slat said he and his team would pay close attention to whether the system works efficiently and withstands harsh ocean conditions. ‘‘We still have to prove the technology . . . which will then allow us to scale up a fleet of systems.’’
The system will act as a ‘‘big boat that stands still in the water’’ and will have a screen and not a net so that there is nothing for marine life to get entangled with. As an extra precautionary measure, a boat carrying experienced marine biologists will be deployed to make sure the device is not harming wildlife. – AP life to safely