Today, the second of October, is a big day for the Ocean CleanUp Project.
If you have never heard about the Ocean Clean Up Project and want to understand how it works, go here.
Today is another milestone day for the ocean clean-up project. Since its first release into the great pacific garbage patch in October 2018, it wasn’t always smooth sailing.
The big U-shaped sausage wasn’t moving fast enough to keep the collected rubbish in its fangs. After some adjustments and a new system, it officially contains floating plastic debris in the Pacific garbage patch.
Our ocean cleanup system is now finally catching plastic, from one-ton ghost nets to tiny microplastics!
— Boyan Slat (@BoyanSlat) October 2, 2019
Also, anyone missing a wheel? pic.twitter.com/Oq0rkXO3TH
“Today we announce that our cleaning system in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch has been catching plastic for the first time,” Boyan Slat, the 25-year-old Dutch CEO and founder of The Ocean CleanUp, told a press conference in Rotterdam.
The idea was born seven years ago when a young Boyan Slat went diving in Greece. He was hoping for colorful fish but found bright plastics instead.
Since then, the idea of the ocean cleanup project was born. In the last year, many adjustments have been made to his system 001, from adding a parachute to slow the system down to changing the size and adding floaters.
The nonprofit hopes to clean the oceans up by as much as 50% in 5 years. And we all hope that they are going to be successful. However, it will not collect microplastic since that is too small to be caught with a big floater.
However, Boyan speaks about collecting microplastic. (The definition for microplastic is 5mm – 0.5nm, so perhaps they are picking some of the 5mm stuff up).
The aim is to haul the plastic waste back to the land where it can be sorted and turned into new products.
