It’s called the System 001 and it has sailed from under the Golden Gate bridge a day ago, to begin testing. If it all works out well, it will be sent to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, in order to begin clearing some of the 80,000 tons of plastic garbage that float out there.
The contraption is the brainchild of Boyan Slat, a Dutch man who had begun working on the invention five years ago and came up with the Ocean Cleanup project.
After going to a holiday in Greece when he was a child, Boyan Slat was disgusted with the amount of plastic waste he saw in the water and decided that he will do something about it one day.
The structure he came up with later one is made out of a series of connected pipes the length of five football fields which have a 9-foot plastic skirt beneath them. It moves along with the current and it forms a U-shape that collects the plastic as it moves. The plastic waste it will gather will be collected by support vessels to be brought to recycling, recycling which, in turn, could help fund it.
The entire system is, reportedly, capable of operating on its own, although a few engineers will stay on a ship in the vicinity to observe and intervene in case there will be any issues.
According to Ocean Cleanup, it would take a fleet of dozens of identical structures to be able to clean up half of the garbage patch in a timeframe of half a decade.
So far, Ocean Cleanup has gathered support from a number of other foundations as well as from philanthropists such as Salesforce founder Marc Benioff. Back in 2017 it was reported the project received a total of approximately $5.9 million in donations and had reserves from the donations of the previous years of around $16 million.
Credit: Ocean Cleanup / YouTube
So far, so good, but there are concerns that the system might not work. So far, it has only benefitted of tests made with small scale models and computer simulations.
One of the worries is about the fact the plastic has sunk much deeper than the System’s skirt is able to reach and, in addition, there is also the issue about the marine life that might become entangled in the structure.
Most of the plastic pollution experts have shown concerns that the system to be used stems from not really understanding the problem and will, in turn, divert attention from solutions that might actually work.
Eben Schwartz, Marine Debris Program Manager, California Coastal Commission has said about the project that
“To make the claim, as the Ocean Cleanup Project is, that they will “clean the oceans” by 2040 or whenever, is disingenuous and misleading, when it will, at best, clean a very small percentage of what’s found on the surface.”
There’s as much praise for the project as much as there is criticism, but Jen Kennedy, Executive Director for the Blue Ocean Society for Marine Conservation, in the midst of all the praise and the criticism has simply stated that “the problem is going to continue until people understand their impact on the ocean and shift away from disposable plastics. Without a human respect for and appreciation for the ocean, the need for cleanups will continue.”
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