The Ocean Cleanup, an environmental nonprofit based out of the Netherlands, removed a record 25,000 pounds of trash from one extraction in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. This was part of an effort in which the nonprofit’s vessels, currently en-route to Victoria, British Columbia, collected 50 tons of garbage in four weeks.
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, also known as the Pacific trash vortex, is an enormous collection of marine debris in the North Pacific Ocean. It is actually comprised of two patches: the Western Garbage Patch, located near Japan, and the Eastern Garbage Patch, located between Hawai’i and California. Floating debris deposited into the ocean is carried by wind and currents and trapped in massive swirling gyres, where it negatively affects marine life and begins to break down into microplastics.
The Ocean Cleanup’s aim is to remove 90 percent of floating plastic from the oceans by 2040, Alex Tobin, head of public relations and media for the organization, told ABC News
The nonprofit has a two-pronged approach of removing plastics from the patch. The first is a system involving two vessels that tow a long U-shaped barrier that guides the plastic into a retention zone at its far end. With the help of computational modeling, the Ocean Cleanup locates garbage hotspots and places the cleanup systems in these areas. Once the system is full, the back of the retention zone is taken aboard, sealed off, detached from the system, and emptied onboard the vessel, where it is sorted for recycling.
View this post on Instagram
By the end of the month, The Ocean Cleanup will launch a larger version of the barrier, called System 03. The new measure will be capable of clearing the size of a football field every five seconds, about twice the speed of the current system, according to Tobin.
The second part of their plan is to clear the rivers that feed into the oceans of trash. This is done using several different systems of barriers and cleanup vessels, depending on the specific challenges of each river.
In the end, the group has the hope that all these advances in ocean cleanup technology will eventually render themselves obsolete. “Our goal is to kind of put ourselves out of business,” Tobin said. “We don’t want to be doing this forever and ever.”
