Several engineers are working to deploy a ‘trash collection device’ in order to enclose plastic litter stirring in the Pacific Ocean. This is an attempt to clear off the world’s largest garbage patch – 2,000 foot long – stagnated between California and Hawaii. This floating debris will be dragged from San Francisco to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which is said to be double in size as that of Texas.
The organization that created this system is ‘Ocean Cleanup’, led by a 24-year old visionary Boyan Slat. This young lad, a native from the Netherlands, had a profound passion of cleaning the oceans and went for Scuba Diving into the Mediterranean Sea, at a mere age of 16, and found that the number of plastic bags in the sea was more than that of the aquatic animals. The plastic is really persistent and it doesn’t go away by itself and the time to act is now,” said Slat.
This organization, founded in 2013, has been able to raise $35 million as donations in order to fund this project. Chief executive of Salesforce.com Marc Benioff and PayPal’s co-founder Peter Thiel will be arranging 60 free-floating barriers by 2020 in the Pacific Ocean. Slat envisions, “One of our goals is to remove 50 percent of the Great Garbage Patch in five years.”
This system is going to act as a “static boat” embedded with a screen and with no use of net so that the aquatic life remains undisturbed. “A boat carrying experienced marine biologists will be deployed to make sure the device is not harming wildlife,” said Slat.
Slat elaborated: “I’m the first to acknowledge this has never done before and that it is important to collect plastic on land and close the taps on plastic entering into the ocean, but I also think humanity can do more than one thing at a time to tackle this problem.”
