By 2050 there could be more plastic in the ocean by weight, than fish
Plastic pollution is definitely one of the largest threats our oceans face today
Every year millions of tonnes of plastic flows from rivers into the sea...
...polluting ecosystems and even getting into the food chain
One group of engineers is applying technology...
...in new ways to tackle plastic pollution
Rivers are really the arteries that carry the plastic from land to sea
By stemming the flow at the source
Roughly four million people live in the basin of the Klang river in Malaysia
It’s one of the most polluted rivers in the world
This team is trying to clean it up
And stop the river’s harmful waste from flowing into the ocean
They’re pinning their hopes on this rubbish-eating boat, called The Interceptor
The river’s current directs the debris onto a barrier...
...from where it is funnelled into the boat’s conveyor belt
This is one of four boats being trialled by The Ocean Cleanup...
...a pioneering engineering company based in the Netherlands
The idea was dreamt up by Boyan Slat...
...who, as a 16-year-old school boy...
...decided to dedicate himself to ridding the ocean of plastic
I went scuba diving in Greece. And I was really hoping to see these...
...beautiful things like you’d see in the David Attenborough documentaries
And looked around me and I just saw more plastic bags than fish
And was rather disappointed by that
And this question came to mind. Why can’t we just clean this up?
Since then his organisation has devised a number of innovative ways...
...to apply technology to the problem
When we started The Ocean Cleanup back in 2013...
...we said, let’s focus our attention on plastic that’s already out there...
...and doesn’t go away by itself. Yet two years later...
...we realised to rid the world’s oceans of plastic...
...you really have to do both the prevention and the clean-up side...
...and started looking at the rivers
Every year millions of tonnes of plastic finds its way into the ocean
Most of which floats down rivers that run through heavily populated areas
Areas where waste-collection systems are flawed or non-existent...
...meaning millions of people are forced to use the waterways...
...as a means of disposal
But the first step to solving the problem is to understand the scale of it
What you see is that the first studies that try to estimate...
...how much plastic is flowing into the ocean...
...were just assumptions, heavily extrapolated over the entire globe
At the beginning, there’s nothing better than those kind of studies
But to truly calculate the amount of pollution in the rivers...
...they need to be monitored continuously
So, The Ocean Cleanup has come up with a new way to do just that...
...using a camera-monitoring system, that can detect the size and type of...
...plastic and the speed at which it’s travelling
It plans to install these cameras on bridges above rivers all over the world...
...in the hope that this will give a clearer idea...
...of where they should concentrate their efforts
Current analysis suggests that 80% of ocean plastic...
...comes from around 1,000 rivers
The vast majority of the worst-polluting rivers...
...are in Asia, Africa and South America
The Pasig river in Manila is one of the worst polluters
It’s calculated that every year 96.5m kgs of plastic...
...travels along the river, some of which ends up in the South China Sea
Plastic pollution’s impact on tourism, fisheries...
...and governmental-cleanup projects is estimated...
...to have cost coastal countries around $19bn per year
But the long-term environmental effect could be far greater
Matthias Egger is a lead scientist at The Ocean Cleanup
This is what marine-based sources of debris looks like—big
With his team, he is studying plastics collected from...
...the so-called “Great Pacific Garbage Patch”...
...a 1.6m sq km zone, near Hawaii, littered with marine debris
But the hard work is done in a lab in Rotterdam
She is extracting the plastics from the sample
She is measuring them to put them in different size classes and different types
This laborious process allows them to understand the amount...
...composition and often the origin of plastic that ends up in the ocean
It looks like Japanese to me. You never see them this size
The impact on marine life is very different for the different kind of plastic...
...and also in terms of sizes. If we have very large piece of plastic...
...like a ghost net, for example, entanglement is the main risk
The smaller the plastic pieces, the more impactful they are on the ecosystem
Sunlight and sea water can break plastic down into microplastics...
...which ocean creatures often mistake for food
When they eat the plastic, they absorb chemicals...
...that then enter the food chain
The long-term effects of these plastics in the food chain...
...and on humans, are still unknown
There’s a lot of research being done at the moment
The tricky part is plastic is very diverse. It’s not just one type of plastic...
...it comes in different sizes, shapes
The data we have so far indicates there is potential negative impact...
...on the marine life. We really need to have an understanding of...
...how much plastic is where and what kind of plastic do we find...
...in the different marine systems, marine compartments
Interceptor boats have been installed in rivers...
...in Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam and the Dominican Republic...
...where each boat has been collecting on average 50,000kg of rubbish a day
So far, we’ve caught roughly two-thirds of the plastic that flows by
The team collaborates with governments to ensure that the plastic collected...
...from the boats is disposed of at local waste-management facilities
But that’s not the end of The Ocean Cleanup’s efforts
For us, it’s not enough to say, OK, we’ve taken it out of the rivers...
...so we feel responsible to actually guarantee that the plastic...
...doesn’t end up back into the river again
The Ocean Cleanup isn’t the only group that is trying...
...to solve the issue of plastic pollution in the world’s rivers
But it believes they have a solution that can scale
We did not design it for one specific river...
...we designed The Interceptor to work in a fast-flowing river in Thailand...
...as well as in a slow-moving river in Indonesia
Over the next few years, the team plans to gain more investment...
...through crowdfunding and independent benefactors...
...to add hundreds more Interceptor boats to its fleet
They also have plans to recycle some of this plastic...
...and create products that can sell, to make the initiative self-sufficient
But removing plastic pollution from the world’s dirtiest rivers...
...will take more than just clever technology
With our Interceptors, it’s not a replacement to having good infrastructure...
...or good policy, right. So, what we actually believe is that...
...these things can be complementary to each other, where...
...with these Interceptors, a lot of data is being collected...
...which can actually help steer policy in other types of campaigns upstream
Until adequate waste collection is implemented globally...
...The Ocean Cleanup will struggle against the growing tide of plastic
But protectors like Boyan Slat are developing new approaches...
...that could benefit the ocean for future generations