A massive floating boom is supposed to clean the Pacific. Can it work? : NPR

A nearly 2,000-foot-long tube is towed off San Francisco Bay on Saturday. It is a giant garbage collector and was designed by Boyan Slat, 24, who aims to eliminate 90% of the plastic of the oceans by 2040.

The cleaning of the ocean

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The cleaning of the ocean

A nearly 2,000-foot-long tube is towed off San Francisco Bay on Saturday. It is a giant garbage collector and was designed by Boyan Slat, 24, who aims to eliminate 90% of the plastic of the oceans by 2040.

The cleaning of the ocean

We humans have deposited a huge amount of plastic in the waters of the Earth. There are now five swirls filled with garbage in the world's oceans – the largest and most famous being the 'Great Pacific Garbage Patch', with its roughly 1,800 billion pieces of plastic spread over twice the size from Texas.

Boyan Slat, a 24-year-old Dutch social entrepreneur who has been trying to invent a solution since the age of 17, has been trying to find a way to clean the ocean. His idea: a giant floating system corral the plastic so that it can be removed – is at the edge of reality.

He founded a non-profit association, The Ocean Cleanup, and won a major United Nations environmental award. Technology investors, including Peter Thiel and Marc Benioff, have been sidelined and Slat has raised $ 35 million to revive his idea.

On Saturday, a ship that was generally towing oil rigs towed the giant garbage collector from Slat, about 300 miles off San Francisco Bay. For two weeks, the engineers will monitor how the system handles the waves crashing in the Pacific before towing it another 1,100 kilometers to the patch.

The centerpiece of the system is a nearly 2,000-foot-long plastic tube with a 10-foot skirt attached underneath, forming a U-shaped barrier designed to be propelled by wind and waves. His goal is to collect the plastic while it floats – and every few months, a support vessel would come to fetch the plastic, like an oceanic garbage truck. The plastic would then be transported to the ground for recycling.

If it works, The Ocean Cleanup plans to deploy a fleet of 60 such devices, which the group plans to remove from half of the plastic of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in five years.

But will it really work? Slat does not know.

His team has changed concept over time, from a moored system to a system adrift, to act more like the plastic that he is trying to catch. They tested a prototype on the North Sea but said the Pacific would be the real challenge.

"We think that all the risks that we can eliminate in advance have been eliminated," he said in a video before Saturday's launch. "But that does not mean that all the risks have been eliminated – in fact, the only way to prove that we can eliminate plastic oceans is to deploy the world's first ocean cleaning system."

The Ocean Cleanup hopes to reduce the amount of plastics in the world's oceans by at least 90% by 2040. But many experts on plastic pollution have voiced their concerns about the fact. effectiveness of the project.

On the one hand, most plastics found in the ocean are not found in these bins.

"Based on the latest calculations, we estimate that about 8 million tonnes of plastic are flowing into the ocean from land all over the world," said George Leonard, chief scientist at Ocean Conservancy. And he says that only 3 to 5% of this total amount of plastic is in the whirlpools.

"So, if you want to clean the ocean," says Leonard, "it may in fact be that the open ocean is not the place to look at".

Part of the problem lies in the fact that not all plastics are carriers. Eben Schwartz, head of the California Coastal Commission's Marine Debris Management Program, said many of these wells are falling immediately – and will not be captured by this floating boom.

"It would be wonderful if we could clean the surface of the gyre, but as much more waste in the ocean does not end up on the surface of the gyre, it is even more important to tackle the situation." and try to stop it at the source, "Schwartz recently told NPR Here and now.

Then there is the question of whether the project could have unforeseen environmental consequences. More specifically: can you capture plastics without harming marine life?

"The fishing industry knows that if you put any kind of structure on the open sea, it will attract a whole community of animals, big and small, in this particular structure," says Leonard.

Fishermen sometimes create fish aggregating devices (FADs) that intentionally create small floating ecosystems to attract fish. "It is feared that this will become a very large FAD and attracts a large number of fish and marine mammals and larger seabirds that could be affected," he says.

In addition, the Ocean Cleanup system is made of high density polyethylene, a kind of plastic. And if that was part of the problem that he is trying to solve?

"I kind of wonder what types of microplastics this thing will generate on its own, assuming it even works exactly as intended," said oceanographer Kara Lavender. Cable. And if the boom breaks in a big storm, well: "If we throw nanometer-sized particles and then break them into 200-meter-long pieces, you really cover the whole gamut."

And then, there is the concern that a large, expensive project like The Ocean Cleanup is diverting money and attention from other efforts known to be effective – like the waste management policies to prevent garbage from entering the ocean.

A study conducted in 2015 found that China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Sri Lanka and Thailand were the main sources of plastic waste in the world's oceans.

"Science shows that about half a dozen countries in Southeast Asia are fast developing economies, heavily reliant on plastic and lacking the kind of waste management infrastructure that many from among us in the United States take for granted. " .

It focuses on a little technical way to help fight plastics in the ocean: pick up trash in your own waterways. The annual International Coastal Cleanup of his organization takes place on September 15, when he says that nearly one million people should work to remove about 20 million pounds of trash from the beaches and waterways of the island. whole world.

Leonard says that the Ocean Conservancy is skeptical about the operation of the giant garbage collector, "but we are excited and hope that's the case."

"The ocean really needs all possible help".