Finally, The World Has Got A Solution To Remove Plastic From Oceans, Thanks To 23-YO Engineer!

With almost 90 percent of world¡¯s plastic never getting recycled, it has become a bane for humanity. Oceans are the biggest victims of this man-made menace as nearly 8 million tons of plastic is dumped into the oceans yearly.

AFP/The Ocean Cleanup

Scientists now are preparing to launch world¡¯s first machine that will clean up the planet¡¯s largest mass of ocean plastic in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

What¡¯s this machine?

This machine is a massive roughly 2000 feet long floating tube which will serve as a U-shaped barrier to help trap plastic. The tube is as long as a football field and is flexible enough to bend with ocean waves and is made of HDPE plastic ¡ª the same material that the system aims to collect.

Who are the people behind it?

The Ocean Cleanup- a no profit technology firm has designed the system to take on the largest swirling mass of plastic waste.

It was set up by Dutch inventor Boyan Slat when he was an 18-year-old aerospace engineering student and he is the man behind this unique way to clean up the Ocean.

The Ocean Cleanup

¡°The plastic pollution problem has always been portrayed as something insolvable. The story has always been ¡®OK, we can¡¯t clean it up - the best we can do is not make it worse¡¯. To me that¡¯s a very uninspiring message,¡± Mr Boyan Slat was quoted by The Independent.

The Dutch had first envisaged this tube when he was a teenager and student of aerospace engineering.

How will it work?

The Ocean Cleanup

Filled with air, the long tubes of approx 40 feet each will be joint together and they will float on the ocean¡¯s surface in an arc. The tubes will have nylon screens hovering down forming a giant floating dustpan to catch the plastic rubbish that gathered together due to the current of waves. The screens, however, will be unable to trap microplastics ¨C tiny fragments.

Fish will be able to escape the screens by swimming underneath them.

When will it be put into the ocean?

The Ocean Cleanup- a team of people giving this system a shape aim to launch it from the shores of San Francisco Bay within weeks. It will probably start cleaning the Ocean by July and the team will keep extending it.

The Ocean Cleanup

The experts believe the machine should be able to collect half of the detritus in the patch ¨C about 40,000 metric tons ¨C within five years.

The plan is to have 60 giant floating scoops, roughly stretching a mile. The boats will collect the debris collected in these tubes every one and half months.

Why Only Great Pacific Garbage Patch?

afp

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a portion of Pacific Ocean where garbage has got collected due to the current of water and it roughly has 79000 tonnes of plastic garbage. Discovered in 1997, the patch is spanned in 617, 673 sq miles which the twice the size of France and roughly contains 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic.

The Ocean Cleanup

¡°The plastic pollution problem has always been portrayed as something unsolvable. The story has always been ¡®OK, we can¡¯t clean it up - the best we can do is not make it worse¡¯. To me that¡¯s a very uninspiring message,¡± said Mr Slat.

The floater pipe section in this picture represents just 10% of the length of the ocean cleanup system once fully assembled. pic.twitter.com/RdnmM11XuW

¡ª Boyan Slat (@BoyanSlat) April 16, 2018

¡°What I really hope is that the ocean clean-up in this century can be a symbol for us using technology to make things better.¡±