[ad_1]
A multi-million dollar floating dam, designed to capture plastic debris from the Pacific Ocean, was deployed Saturday from San Francisco Bay as part of a more ambitious, high-stakes business.
The 2,000-foot-long unmanned structure was the product of about $ 20 million from Ocean Cleanup, a nonprofit organization that aims to trap up to 150,000 pounds of plastic in the first year of operation. sea of the boom. In the next five years, with the creation of dozens of new booms, the organization hopes to clean up half of the garbage in the Greater Pacific.
The patch, a gyre of waste located between California and Hawaii, includes about 1.8 trillion trash debris, including at least 87,000 tons of plastic.
Over the next few days, the boom will be towed to a site where it will be subjected to two weeks of testing. If all goes as planned, the boom will then be thrown into the bin, nearly 1400 miles offshore, where it is expected to arrive in mid-October, said Boyan Slat, a 24-year-old Dutch inventor and entrepreneur.
The arrow has an impenetrable skirt that weighs nearly 10 feet below to catch smaller pieces of plastic. The non-profit organization said that marine life could pass underneath.
But the ocean can be unpredictable and simulation models do not guarantee future performance.
"There is a fear that you will not be able to remove the plastic without removing marine life at the same time," said George Leonard, chief scientist at the Ocean Conservancy. "The fishing industry knows that if you set up a structure at sea, it acts as a fish aggregator."
Small fish, attracted by a new structure, can attract larger fish, he added, creating a "whole ecological community".
It is unclear how the boom would take place in the open sea, where it faces strong winds, corrosive salt water and other environmental problems. And then the question is whether half of the waste can be cleaned in just five years.
"I think the big challenge here is not the long-term goal, but the short-term goal," Leonard said Saturday. "Can he remove plastic at all?"
Mr. Slat, Chief Executive Officer of Ocean Cleanup, shared the same concern for a video posted on Facebook.
"And for me, that's where I think my biggest anxiety is at this stage," he said of the system's ability to collect and hold plastic. "First of all, it's something we have not really been able to test."
But on Saturday morning, Mr. Slat was decidedly optimistic.
"I have never been as confident about the chances of success that I am today," he said.
Since the launch of Ocean Cleanup in 2013, donors have donated nearly $ 35 million, said Mr Slat. Much of this money has contributed to the boom and helped fund research like a study published in the journal Scientific Reports, which quantified the extent of the garbage parcel. Future booms are expected to cost about $ 5.8 million each.
Marc Benioff, general manager of Salesforce.com, and Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, are the main sponsors.
Skeptics wondered if this was the most economically efficient way to solve the problem.
"I totally agree that this is not the complete solution to plastic pollution," said Slat.
Although it is necessary to prevent more plastic from entering the ocean, what is already there will not disappear on its own, he added.
"We have to clean it up at some point and, in fact, I would say the sooner the better," he said.
Source link
