Recently, I came upon this article about an Ocean Cleanup Device that returned to Vancouver with over 60 trash bag sized bags of plastic. A company named The Ocean Cleanup developed these devices and deployed them in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, to remove plastics from there and slowly clean the entire ocean.
CEO Boyan Slat’s vision is to have the ocean completely clean by 2050, and he plans to do this by using the devices that he developed to clean the ocean. Our project group actually took a decent amount of inspiration from his ideas, and our original plan was to build a device like his. We didn’t have the resources to do something like that, but a lot of our research about what people are doing included him and his company.
His devices can filter out all types of plastic from the ocean, including microplastics, which are plastics less than 0.2 in (5 mm) in length. Basically, a floating “coastline” traps the plastic, then boats go around and pick up the plastic store it to be recycled/thrown away.
Boyan Slat’s plan is to have 50% of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch gone in 5 years, but he says this can only be done if he continues to have the funding and equipment to deploy a full scale system, with many devices instead of just one or two.
But what does this all mean to us? First of all, just because the ocean is being cleaned, doesn’t mean we can keep littering, and expect it to be cleaned. This is actually one of Slat’s major concerns. On the other hand, this can raise awareness to issues such as marine plastic pollution, and cause major global corporations and governments to place restrictions on plastic waste disposal. In my opinion, Slat is an ambitious engineer, and I agree with his plan to clean the ocean.