There have been many attempts to clear out ocean plastic. But there are still tonnes of plastic present in oceans throughout the world. However, one recent attempt to eliminate floating plastic pollution from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (GPGP) has proved to be successful. The Ocean Cleanup, a non-profit organization determined to eradicate plastic dumped in oceans, has lately recovered 100,000 kg of plastic from the GPGP.
The organization shared its successful ocean plastic elimination in a LinkedIn post. The non-profit organization works with several advanced technologies to eliminate plastics thrown into the oceans. The firm’s target is to clear out the GPGP in the North Pacific Ocean. In this particular region, tonnes of ocean plastic gets accumulated from countries in South America, Asia, and North America.
Image: The Ocean Cleanup
To clear up the GPGP, they have created a strategy to form System 001 that includes a floating barrier for collecting plastic and other debris. This floating barrier was slowed due to sea anchors in 2018 after the constant pushing of wind, waves, and water currents. Hence, the makers had to test it for efficiency.
After some improvements, the manufacturers dropped sea anchors in favor of the water-borne parachute. This could further slow down the system but improves its plastic collection ability. The new system is called System 002 and this apparatus is a large-scale clean-up unit. After thorough testing of this system for more than 12 weeks in 2021, this was then set up for a mission to collect plastic from the ocean.
Recently, the constant effort has hit a big milestone when this system cleared up around 101,353 kg of plastic so far. It is the result of 45 extraction trips by the system around 3000 square kilometers across the ocean.
Although it’s the latest and biggest cleanup in history, it’s estimated that GPGP still has 100,000,000 kg of plastic waste. It means that the team has to mark another 999 of these milestones before proper clean-up of the GPGP, provided no more plastic gets dumped into the ocean right from this moment.
The Ocean Cleanup has a goal set for 2040 to decrease the amount of ocean plastic by 90 percent. They have two strategies to do so. One is to create a new System 003 with a larger and highly efficient cleanup system to collect plastic 10 times faster than the current System 002. For this, the organization has to use a new blueprint for creating a fleet of cleanup systems for the future.
The second strategy is to prevent plastic dumping into the oceans. For this, Ocean Cleanup is building and testing interceptor layouts across the river systems for stopping plastic debris from reaching the oceans.
Via: Design Taxi