This 2,000m floating line will become the longest floating structure in the world when it’s deployed in 2016.
An ambitious new project is hoping to help clean the world's oceans with a trash collector that is reportedly the longest floating structure in recorded world history.
The Ocean Cleanup project was created by a 20-year-old innovator in the Netherlands, Boyan Slat, who was drawn to the idea after encountering plastic pollution in the Mediterranean.
He’s set out to do nothing less than rid the oceans of the millions of tons of plastic garbage that circle along their currents.
Slat’s invention consists of an anchored network of floating booms and processing platforms that could be dispatched to garbage patches around the world. Working with the flow of nature, his solution to the problematic shifting of trash is to have the array span the radius of a garbage patch, acting as a giant funnel as the ocean moves through it. The angle of the booms would force plastic in the direction of the platforms, where it would be separated from smaller forms, such as plankton, and be filtered and stored for recycling. The issue of by-catches, killing life forms in the procedure of cleaning trash, can be virtually eliminated by using booms instead of nets and it will result in a larger areas covered. Because of trash’s density compared to larger sea animals, the use of booms will allow creatures to swim under the booms unaffected, reducing wildlife death substantially.
It is estimated that the clean-up process would take about a decade, and it could greatly increase awareness about the world’s plastic garbage patches.
Pollution in the world’s waterways is one of the most serious challenges that our species is facing, and creative solutions are going to be needed in order to solve this problem. People from all over the world have recognized this issue and have been working hard to come up with their own ideas to clean trash from oceans and other bodies of water.
His goal is to eventually build a 100km floating array that could collect 70,320,000kg of plastic waste over 10 years.
Slat estimates that this method would cost roughly 4.53 euros (5.04 USD) per kilogram, which is only 3% of the cost of other potential clean-up methods
I wish that Slat will achieve his visionary goals!!!
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