The plan for cleaning the trash can of the Great Pacific begins

SAN FRANCISCO – An ambitious project to clean up the ocean's plastic pollution began this weekend as members of the Ocean Cleanup project began towing their system offshore.

If it works as expected, they will try to take a bite out of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch – a huge collection of floating garbage that is three times the size of France, about double the size of Texas.

The 001 Ocean Cleaning System consists of a 600 meter (2,000 feet) long floating barrier with a 3 meter (10 feet) skirt under the water.

It looks like a pipe section or a giant pool noodle – a pool noodle longer than the One World Trade Center skyscraper in Lower Manhattan.

He left San Francisco, California on Saturday, and was towed 240 nautical miles offshore for a two-week test to ensure he behaved as expected on the high seas.

When it is deployed, it curves U-shaped because it is pushed by the wind and the waves. The slow-motion system will corrode the floating plastic on the surface, while fish and other organisms of marine life can swim underneath.

Smaller boats will then collect the plastic and bring it back to the ground, where it can be recycled.

"One of the challenges we have is that we want to catch plastic, not fish," said Joost Dubois, communications manager at Ocean Cleanup. He said the teams will manually check the waste to make sure they do not accidentally catch fish or other marine animals.

"We are trying to solve an environmental problem, so we need to be sure we do not create a bigger problem in its place," he said.

Once the cruise is over, it will take two or three weeks to tow the system an additional 1,000 nautical miles to the Grand Pacific Garbage Storage Area, where they can recover the plastic and survive the severe winter storms.

The crews will stay with the system for the first six months, but they hope that an autonomous vehicle will be able to monitor it after that.

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" is the nickname given to a region between Hawaii and California.

It is a rotating current, called a gyre, that pulls in the trash and does not let it go. There are several in the world.

Ocean Cleanup founder Boyan Slat told CNN earlier this year that the patch contained about 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic weighing 80,000 tons.

"It's also increasing, so we've seen an exponential increase in the amount of plastic, which means it's going to get worse and worse unless you clean it," he said.

Slat also stressed the importance of preventing new plastics from entering the water.

According to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, it is estimated that eight tons of plastic are found each year in the oceans.

Plastics make paradise a graveyard

Miriam Goldstein, Director of Ocean Policy at the Center for American Progress, criticized the program. She studied the Great Pacific Garbage Patch for her Ph.D. in biological oceanography and has been there many times.

"I would like nothing more than that to make it work. I would really like it to be the solution for ocean plastics, but I think there are very big questions that remain unanswered, "she said.

She said that the deployment of such a gigantic device would create its own environment: barnacles and other marine animals would grow and fish would stay below.

Goldstein said that he could also accidentally catch plankton floating on the surface.

"If they grow a bunch of Goose Goose Geese and they get killed as a result, I do not think anyone cares really … that probably does not mean any problems for them. environment, "she said. "But if they catch all the plankton on a long ocean strip of one kilometer, this seems like a strong effect."

She also questioned the wisdom of focusing on the plastic that is in the middle of the ocean rather than the cheaper technologies that can prevent waste from getting there.

"It's like trying to empty a bathtub when the tap is full," she said.

She pointed to Baltimore's Mr. Trash Wheel, who has removed nearly 2 million pounds of waste from the Baltimore Inner Harbor since 2014.

Goldstein said that she would like to see The Ocean Cleanup calling on independent scientists to see if the project really works.

Dubois said The Ocean Cleanup is responsible and has tried to respond to these criticisms.

He said the 001 system should be able to recover 50 tons of plastic from the ocean a year.

They plan to deploy 60 even larger systems, from one kilometer to a mile and a half long, added Mr. Dubois. They may eventually swallow a total of 14,000 tons of plastic each year.

The Ocean Cleanup team believes that the fleet could extract 50% of the plastic from the garbage cans every five years.