Ocean clean-up prepares for historic launch, but challenges ahead

After years of anticipation,
The Ocean Cleanup will launch the world's first ocean cleaning system across the San Francisco Bay Area and go to sea on Saturday.

Five years ago, as a teenager
Boyan Slat hit the headlines for his plastic capture concept. Today, at the age of 23, the Dutch inventor is ready to live out his dream of cleaning up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a whirlwind of waste and plastic floating off California.

"System 001" consists of a 600 meter long floating pipe with a 3 meter tapered skirt set below to catch debris like "a giant of Pac Man powered by wind and waves", Slat
I said.

He will spend two weeks at a Pacific Trials location, about 250-350 nautical miles offshore, before being towed up to 1,000 nautical miles away.

The captured plastic will be collected by a ship approximately every month. The debris will then be sorted for recycling or recycling to create new products.

If all goes as planned, 60 of these systems will be deployed at sea with the aim of eliminating 50% of the waste in the next five years.

The cleaning of the ocean

It took years of research and development for Slat and his team at The Ocean Cleanup to reach this stage, including 273 mock-ups, six prototypes at sea and one
detailed mapping of the household waste in the Grand Pacific. The project raised approximately $ 40 million in investor financing, Wired said.

The concept, however, received a fair share of
critical. There is the fear that it could harm fish or other bycatch. Others have suggested that upstream designs (for example, the Baltimore Harbor solar-powered garbage wheel) and policy solutions will better stem the flow of plastics before they reach it. In addition, the idea of ​​a "parcel" of waste where debris floats on the surface of the water is a myth: plastics are found on the seabed and vertically in the ocean.

Slat has already
has long responded to criticism. However, it anticipates a number of challenges.

In a recent cleaning of the oceans
video, he explained the three main risks:

1) That the waves and winds could change the shape of the Pac-Man system;

2) While scale models have been able to collect plastic up to the millimeter, Slat fears that the complete system may not collect and effectively retain plastic at sea;

3) From high waves, strong currents, UV rays and corrosive sea salt, Slat wonders if the system will be able to survive intense ocean conditions. "The ocean is a very destructive environment," he said.

"We think that all the risks we can eliminate in advance have been eliminated, but that does not mean that all the risks have been eliminated," Slat said in the video. "In truth, the only way to prove that we can rid the oceans of plastic is to deploy the world's first ocean cleaning system."

For those who wish to watch the launch, click on
here for a livestream from 12h Pacific Time.

The cleaning of the ocean