Cleaning Plastic Pollution From the Ocean

While governments and businesses wrestle with the problem of plastic pollution through recycling and other schemes, the issue of the plastic that has already made it to the ocean persists. According to the Interesting Engineering site, a nonprofit called the Ocean Cleanup is ready to deploy a device in the Pacific Ocean to start gathering up the stuff so that it can be collected and taken back to shore for processing.

The device consists, ironically, of a huge plastic tube that floats on the surface of the ocean and is secured on both ends by floating anchors. A nylon screen, designed to catch subsurface plastic but not marine life, will stretch below the surface.

The initial test of the plastic catching device will take place just outside San Francisco Bay. If everything seems to work correctly, it will be towed out to the huge, country-sized island of plastic that is swirling about the Pacific, a voyage of about three weeks. By late fall, the first shipment of recovered plastic will be returned to make consumer goods. Many companies, such as Adidas, have already recognized the branding appeal of creating products that are generated from plastic trash that is recovered from the ocean.

Ocean Cleanup is the creation of Boyan Slat, a Dutch inventor, and engineering school dropout. Slat discovered the plastic pollution problem when he was diving off Greece and conceived of developing ways to clean it up at the age of 18. Now 23, Slat has raised $31.5 million for his plastic cleanup plan. A full-scale operation will join the original device by 2020 that Slat hopes will remove half of the plastic in the Pacific Ocean within five years. Slat’s plan is considered a crucial part of an effort to end the problem of plastic pollution in the oceans.