We're now around the 170-ton mark, and we have an extraction coming up today.
So it will be more from from today onwards.
We started with System 002, that's already more than a year ago.
And System 002 is 800 meters long
and the next system will be System 03, which will be 2400 meters long.
And currently the 800 meters that we now have in the water, we call it System 002/B.
So we first exchange that retention zone. So that's now 25 tons.
Then the next step was to change the wings so having one meter deeper and stronger lines.
So that's now in the water.
And then the next step will be to build the wings longer, up to 2400 meters of length.
And that's the transition to System 03.
The funny thing about trip 11 and 12 is that all the components were new,
so there was not a single component that we started out with just over one year ago.
All the wings, the whole retention zone has been completely replaced.
I think for me it's a success. We have made a transition from a
system to another with very, very little hiccups.
A lot of learning, a lot of improvements we can make. But I think this is huge.
This success is not just about the design, but it's also about operation, testing.
And I think the steering strategy has improved a lot, that was really impressive.
I think if you look at the consistency over the last couple of trips, yeah, that's just great
that you take out 25 tons in one trip for three trips in a row. That's just massive.
And every time I watch a video where the bag is up and it all clashes down on the deck,
you feel or I feel it makes sense what we're doing.
There's a long way to go, but we're on the right track.
We have a winter break. We go into idle as we call it.
And that has a couple of reasons. One is that it's good to take a break,
reflect on how we're doing things and improve and come back stronger.
The other thing is that we are setting ourselves up for System 03.
That will be a system that's three times as long as what we have now.
So we need to do modifications to the vessel,
change all our procedures and adapt our way of working to that.
The winter is more difficult for a couple of reasons. One is that
the waves are higher. So you need to take a different route to the patch.
So a longer sailing time you can be less on the deck and you can have less testing possibilities
and less weather windows, meaning that you have less time to do work with small vessels.
And plastics, they will behave differently,
so they will probably go a bit deeper into the water. So you will catch probably less.
Last factor is that the hotspots, as mentioned, we may not always be able to go there
because the weather's bad at that place, if there's a storm, we're not going to operate there.
So it means we're sometimes in a suboptimal location and also,
therefore, we may catch less plastics.
So we use that idle time to reflect and then
come back stronger. But also be prepared for the coming year.
So by the 13th of December, both vessels will sail into the Port of Victoria in Canada.
Then we'll go into idle and we will be back early March 2023.
So now during Tip 12, we're doing various tests to find out how our system is actually performing
and well,
this is always the same, but no one has ever done anything like this before,
so there is no standard for how much plastics
should you catch or what amount of plastics is normal to lose.
And we do have this issue of overtopping.
There's a certain amount of plastics that we lose because waves wash over the wings
and take away plastics from the retention zone.
So we are doing a couple of tests right now during Trip 12 and they
have bigger fenders or different type of fenders.
So we can test what the effect is of having a higher freeboard.
So the fender is a little bit bigger, so it's more difficult for a wave to wash over the wing.
They have done a lot of efficiency tests. So really to be able to
measure the performance of the system from a plastic capturing efficiency point of view.
And so for that we use tagged plastic and then we
know what we're throwing and we know what we're capturing
and try to assess how much plastic do we lose by overtopping and underflow,
because we need to understand where we have to improve our system and change our design.
In terms of environmental impact, the system is doing very well.
So in terms of encounters with marine life, we have estimated bycatch rates.
So how much plastic is extracted versus how much marine life also comes with the operations
and the bycatch rate is 0.1%, which means we have 99.9% of
plastics and 0.1% of marine life. So that's a very low bycatch rate,
which indicates that the mitigations are working well and that The Ocean Cleanup is
doing a pretty good job at minimizing the impact to the local environment.
System 03 has several updates,
we will have more mitigation measures implemented to update the system
and make sure the environmental impact stays as low as possible.
We'll have more monitoring effort through the
cameras. It's going to be a lot more underwater cameras.
And you have the AI, the artificial intelligence detection system,
which is currently being developed as well, and more openings for organisms to escape.
So all of this is aimed towards minimizing the impact as much as possible
while still harvesting as much plastic as possible.
So currently we are sorting through our last extraction of the year.
So in the coming days we will sort through all our plastic,
we will weigh everything, pack it up, recover our system,
make sure the vessels are ready for the trip back to Victoria
because looking at the forecast it is going to be a bumpy ride.
We bring the plastics to recyclers
and currently the recyclers, especially for ghost nets, they are not locally available,
so we have to transfer that to different parts of the world like Europe.
We turn it into base material for durable products and we want to do that together with others.
So we have partners that can use that material
in their products and in that way support The Ocean Cleanup
so we can continue to get the plastics out
and make sure that it doesn't end up back in the patch again.
What is really cool is always if you see a render like the one we brought forward,
ok this is what System 03 is going to look like
and then see the reality match that. Yeah that's what I hope to see next year,
that you see a massive system catching more plastic than you can imagine
and then bring that to shore.
I think that's definitely my hope.
If we catch as much plastic as we think we're going to do,
then we run out of space on the vessels.
It's a bit of a luxury problem, but we want to manage that.
So we're looking into having a compactor that can compact the
rigid plastics and then make sure that we have enough storage space offshore.
Because what we're doing now that is basically proving that we can catch plastics offshore.
We're well on our way with that, but the next step is that we clean the whole patch and for
that we must find out, what's the most effective way to scale this concept up.