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The Dutch innovator Boyan Slat poses for a portrait next to the anchors of his plastic collection system in 2017. The waste collection device set up for flotation of plastic litter captures no waste.
Peter Dejong / AP
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Peter Dejong / AP
The innovative Dutch boyan slat poses for a portrait next to the anchors of his plastic collection system in 2017. The garbage collection device set up for flotation of plastic litter captures no waste.
Peter Dejong / AP
A team of engineers in the middle of the ocean will attempt to repair a device designed to clean the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, where about 1,800 billion pieces of plastic were collected in a two debris field times bigger than Texas.
The waste collector has been floating in the Pacific since its highly anticipated launch in San Francisco in September, but has not yet produced the expected results.
Its inventor, Boyan Slat, aged 24, told the Associated Press that the solar energy barrier has not collected waste because it travels slower than plastic than it does. She's trying to capture.
"What you do not want of course, because then you have a chance to lose the plastic again," said the Dutch innovator in a video. "[We’re] is trying to speed up the system just enough so that it is always faster than plastic, which we need."
Slat and his team said they expected to encounter problems like this.
"What we are trying to do has never been done before," Slat said. "So, of course, we expected to still have to settle some points before the system became fully operational."
Humans deposit more than eight million tons of waste every year in the ocean, said Nicholas Mallos of the Ocean Conservancy to Michel Martin of NPR. It's the equivalent of a plastic-filled dump truck every minute.
Ocean currents transport some of this waste into five gyres filled with waste, as NPR's Here & Now report has reported. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which formed between California and Hawaii, is the largest of these garbage islands.
The Slat system, a 10-foot skirt set under an unmoored plastic tube 2000 feet long, takes advantage of the wind and waves to move across the Pacific Ocean. The system aims to collect the plastic on the surface of the water, which would then be picked up every few months by an assistance vessel and brought ashore for recycling. The garbage bin uses solar powered lights, cameras, sensors and satellite antennas to communicate its position to the Slat team and passing ships.
The Ocean Cleanup
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Slat has been working on the invention since he was 17, he told NPR in 2016. At the beginning of the project he mobilized the support from 50,000 donors worldwide. Then Silicon Valley investors, Peter Thiel and Mark Benioff, subscribed to the idea of his nonprofit project, The Ocean Cleanup.
More than 80 engineers, researchers, scientists and computational modelers are now working on the project. According to the project, the team uses drones to observe the evolution of the system over time.
"Plastics enter the system, but sometimes we see plastics leaving the system again," he said in a video. "We now have with the entire team of engineers who is trying to understand why this is happening."
Tjallema announced his intention to change the configuration of the aircraft to allow the wind to propel the tube more quickly into the water.
Slat says he's confident, the basic principles behind this idea hold. If the team can modify the system to overcome this failure, he plans to launch dozens of copies in the Pacific Ocean. His group predicts that by flicking the surface of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, devices can eliminate 50% of the plastic from the ocean in just five years.
"We gave ourselves one year after the launch for this thing to work," he told AP.
Critics of the project expressed concerns about the effectiveness of the device. George Leonard, chief scientist at the Ocean Conservancy, told NPR in September that only 3 to 5 percent of the plastic dumped into the ocean was found in these huge gyres.
"So, if you want to clean the ocean," Leonard says, "it may actually be that the ocean is not the perfect place to look."
Leonard says that the project could also divert resources from efforts that prevent wastes from reaching the ocean from the start. [19659008] Other skeptics have pointed out that the floating pipe could have unintended consequences on the ecosystem, by attracting fish or by projecting plastic nanoparticles into the water, as the watershed might have. reported Wired. But he told AP that there was "no real rational argument" for not moving forward with the project. He says that if the device manages to collect its first load of waste, it would be a symbolic moment.
"It has been 60 years since man puts plastic in the ocean," he said. "And from that day on, we'll take it back as well."
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