The Ocean Clean Up
Did you know that there is a floating dump in the Pacific its surface is exactly 3 times the surface area of France?
Boyan Slat; He is a 26-year-old young entrepreneur. He founded “The Ocean Clean Up”, a nonprofit enterprise, in 2013 when he was just 19 years old. Its purpose is to recycle the dense plastic waste in the oceans, reducing the concentration of microplastics and cleaning the oceans.
To do so, he is working on clearing the “Great Pacific garbage dump” in the Pacific Ocean. Of course, cleaning this garbage island is not as easy as it seems. It is necessary to use and develop advanced technologies and designs that are resistant to the ocean environment. Therefore Boyan and his team have 2 basic technology solutions.
With these solutions; they have been targeting to half microplastics consantration at garbage dump in 5 years.
The Ocean Clean Up team has done some research to determine the source of this garbage pile and by taking measurements on exactly 100,000 rivers in the world, it has determined that 80% of the garbage accumulated in the ocean comes from only 1,000 rivers. Unfortunately, the pile of garbage in the Pacific is getting bigger and bigger every year. Its current size is 1,931,403 square kilometers. The team designed the “Interceptor 001” to be placed on rivers to slow growth; “System 001” to clean the floating garbage. Interceptor is an autonomous ship powered by solar energy. Some of its parts were even made by recycling plastic collected from rivers.
The good news is that 4 interceptors are currently in operation and have already been installed on 3 rivers in Indonesia, Malaysia, Dominican Republic, 3 of which are the most polluting. The last one is ready to be placed in a ready state.
There is also an interactive map showing the rivers on the startup’s website. You can see the state of the rivers in your country.
By processing the plastics have been cleaned up, they have already designed durable and usable products. For example, a pair of glasses with a price of 199 € is said to provide financing to clear the plastics about 12 football fields in size.
So, is this project scalable? Is it economically sustainable and can its use spread around the world? It looks like that, according to Boyan’s account. He can even convince you that the cost of cleaning is much cheaper than the cost of not cleaning.
Few people in the world are trying to clean up what the majority pollutes. Are you in this striving minority?
Best Regards;
Ayhan
