You’ve probably seen this before.
It was most likely one of those things you saw all over Facebook for about a week and
then never heard of again.
This is The Ocean Cleanup’s first autonomous system.
It was launched back in September 2018 and we’ve not heard much from it since.
But how is it even supposed to work?
And after being at sea for 3 months what went wrong?
First, let's tackle why this giant pool noodle is even needed.
If you’ve seen a good amount of films you know we leave a lot of stuff in the ocean.
Volleyballs with personalities, the titanic and Johnny Depp every three or four years.
Basically, at this point Hollywood has destroyed the ocean, like it has with some of it’s
biggest stars.
I’m just going to use this picture again (Johnny Depp).
However, what’s happened on screen is nothing compared to what humans have done to it in
the real world.
We’ve split oil all over the place, crashed the real titanic and most-importantly dumped
a lot of our waste in it.
Somethings are worse than others, paper and food waste takes just months if not weeks
to decompose, for some reason we know a battery takes 100 years, but the worst polluter of
all is plastic.
And it’s this long lasting, waterproof material The Ocean Cleanup is attempting to well…
cleanup.
As a species we dump 8 million tons of the stuff in our oceans every single year, that
weighs more than the Empire state building, or 21 of them and is actually more than every
other species does combined.
That’s a rate so high that by 2050 it’s predicted we’ll have more plastic floating
around in the worlds waters than we will fish.
And it’s a global problem, even though 90% of all plastic waste that enters the ocean
does so through these 10 rivers (highlights rivers on map), China’s Yangtze River river
alone pushes out 1.5 million tons.
Presumably, it’s quite easy to tell where it’s come from.
(made in China print) Although, that might make those countries sound like the bad guys,
it’s worth noting that until recently, most of the western world hasn’t really been
dealing with their plastic waste.
Instead they ship it to developing countries, abusing their power and influence for their
own gain.
Ahh just like the good old days.
The UK alone was shipping half a million tonnes of plastic waste to China every single year.
If you like David Attenborough, and I mean, how can you not, you’ll know that this plastic
can obviously be dangerous to marine life.
A lot of marine life is too small to ingest the larger pieces of plastic in the ocean.
However, there’s another type of plastic that is much more dangerous.
Microplastics are pieces that measure less than 5mm, this means they’re easily digestible
by most marine life and can clog up their breathing or digestive systems and eventually
Some of the microplastics are small enough that they’re able to get into the meat of
the fish.
This then means that humans end up ingesting it when they eat seafood.
There’s not a huge amount of research into the topic so we can’t be sure how bad this
is for the human body, however, there are also the chemicals used on the plastic that
then leach out into that water and into fish stocks and some are linked to cancer rates,
and we know that’s pretty bad for the body.
So, what should we do about the plastic?
Well, for me and you the best we can do is reduce our plastic waste.
This is a big subject, 40% of plastic waste is from single use packaging.
But that’s a whole other thing, so I’m not going to cover that in this video.
Rather conveniently, Steph from ScienceWithSteph is making a video all about how much plastic
humans use and where it comes from.
She’s also actually got real life qualifications that says she’s a smart person who knows
things about stuff so you should definitely go check out her video after this one!
The issue with just reducing our plastic now is that it’s a little too late.
There are already 150 million tons of the stuff in our oceans and with a decomposition
time of anywhere from 500-1000 years, we need to start doing something about it now if we
don’t want our future descendants to know how much we liked fidget spinners and yo-yos,
who am I kidding, yo-yos will still be all the rage.
Because of the currents of the ocean plastic ends up amassing in huge ‘garbage pataches’,
the biggest of which is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, of course the one next to the
US has to be the biggest and called ‘Great’.
It’s been measured to cover 1.6 million square kilometers, which is three times the
land area of France.
One solution to the problem has been pitched by the creatively named ‘The Ocean Cleanup’
but they are from the Netherlands so maybe it sounds cooler in Dutch.
It was founded in 2013 by Boyan Slat, who joins the list of new technology leaders with
cool names.
He and his team managed to raise $2 million in crowdfunding but also $21.7 million from
the owner of Salesforce.
With all of this money they’ve spent five years refining the plan and giving the tech
journalists something to fangirl over.
Eventually, back in late 2018 they launched System 001 to attempt to clean up the Great
Pacific Garbage Patch.
They claim that this one system can reduce the patch by half every 5 years and eventually
they want to get a network of 60 of them working around the worlds oceans.
To give a brief breakdown of how the system works, it’s a 600 meter long tube that floats
on the top of the ocean.
This numbers just a little down from the original plan to make it 100 kilometers long.
It also has a short skirt hanging below it.
The theory is that the plastic in the ocean is moving as fast as the current.
However, the system would be push by not only the current, but also wind and wave power.
Therefore, it would catch up with the plastic and then a retrieval vessel would go out and
scoop it all up.
However, the launch of this first system, named Wilson after Cast Away, hasn’t been
a raging success.
And when I say it hasn’t been a raging success, I mean, it hasn’t really worked at all.
Sure the thing floats, it moves and from what we can see no marine life is being caught
up in it.
However, it’s proved to have a slight flaw where by it suddenly splits in half and the
parts float away from each other.
In late December an 18-meter section of the system broke away due to mechanical stress
from where the screen that hangs below the system was attached.
The company were quick on their feet to get out there and retrieve it so it didn’t become
just another piece of ocean debris.
They towed the entire system back to Hawaii and plan to have it back on duty by Summer
this year.
But, The Ocean Cleanup has admitted that the mechanical failure is really the least of
the issues.
They discovered what caused the split fairly quickly and say they can implement changes
that will reduce the stress on the system, they plan to suspend the screen between two
points on the system but not directly beneath it.
However, what they haven’t fixed is the fact that the system designed to capture plastic
wasn’t capturing any plastic.
Actually, that’s not technically true, the plastic was captured but it was then just
as quickly released.
The company says the root cause of the issue is that the system just isn’t moving fast
enough.
So at times the plastic is moving faster and just outrunning the systems grasp.
They’ve announced two possible measures to combat this, one, float some large boys
in front of the craft to act as sails and drag it along, or two, attach what is essentially
a giant parachute to it to work in a similar way.
These aren’t even the only problems the project has faced.
All through its development it’s faced scepticism from scientists.
Mostly, about how worthwhile these systems are.
Estimates say that only 5% of the plastic in the ocean ever ends up in one of these
garbage patches and most of it doesn’t just float around on the surface.
Another study estimated that 92% of the plastic in the ocean is smaller than microplastics
and therefore isn’t likely to be caught by the system.
Critics have said that the massive amounts of money spent on the project could be put
to better use reducing and recycling plastic waste.
Maybe that’s true, but predictably everyone wanted this to work because it would mean
they wouldn’t have to work as hard reducing their plastic use and could keep eating their
crisps and might not have to pay any more for a carrier bag.
So it remains to be seen how effective the ocean cleanup project can really be.
It’s certainly not the start the company would have hoped for but with them planning
to re-launch the system in the next month or so we’ll have to wait and see how well
it fares this time.
Let me know what you think about the project in the comments, will it work or is it a waste
of money?
Cheers for checking out my video.
Remember to go and check out ScienceWithSteph’s video over on her channel.
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