Three of the boats, together with a 171-foot mom ship, will arrive at San Francisco’s Piers 30-32 on Sunday, when the subsequent steps may even be introduced.
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The crew of the Ocean Cleanup, backed by volunteers in sailboats, ventured to areas of the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch”, a swirling mass of human-linked debris spanning hundreds of miles of open sea where plastic outnumbers organisms by factors in the hundreds.
“The vast majority of the plastic in the garbage patch is now locked up in large pieces of debris, but UV light is breaking it down into much more unsafe microplastics, vastly increasing the amount of microplastics over the next few decades if we don’t clean it up”, said the Ocean Cleanup’s CEO and founder Boyan Slat.
Slat said the group will publish a report of its findings by mid-2016 and after that they hope to test out a 1-mile barrier to collect garbage near Japan.
The Ocean Cleanup team, founded by 21-year old Dutch aerospace engineer Boyan Slat, proposes a system of floating barriers several kilometres in length that would gather the plastic waste with the help of the ocean’s natural movements.
Researchers returned on 24 August from mapping and sampling a massive swirling cluster of rubbish floating in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, as the Dutch-borne crew works to refine a clean-up strategy it will roll out globally.
He first became passionate about cleaning the oceans of plastic while diving in the Mediterranean Sea five years ago. “I was diving in Greece and realized that there were more plastic bags than fish, and I wondered why can’t we clean this up”, Slat said. That system will contain floating stationary booms tethered to the ocean floor and linked in a V shape intended to skim and concentrate surface plastics floating on top of ocean currents.
After a 2012 Ted Talk about his idea was viewed more than 2 million times, Slat decided to launch a kick starter campaign and raised $2 million euros (about $ 2.27 million) that helped to start his organization. Quickly, his progressive answer received the eye of main philanthropists in Europe and Silicon Valley who’re serving to fund the data-gathering efforts and the know-how’s improvement.
The cost of the reconnaissance expedition and the debris collection system was not disclosed. It additionally will give a greater estimate of the how a lot plastic waste is within the Pacific Ocean, he stated.
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The Nice Pacific Rubbish Patch was found by Charles J. Moore in 1997 as he returned house from the Transpacific Yacht Race, which begins in Los Angeles and ends in Honolulu.
