First Ever Great Plastic Clean Up for Oceans

The first ever machine is all set to sail to initiate the clean-up campaign the planet’s largest part of ocean plastic. It’s directing to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which is a halfway between California and Hawaii.

The objective is, to begin with, collecting 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic waste accumulated over there by ocean currents. The system formed uses a combination of large floating nets also known as dubbed screens, which are contained at one place by giant tubes made of plastic, and they suck the stubborn trash out of the water.

Then, this collected rubbish is transferred to large ships that will head this waste to stores for recycling.

This intricate system will originate from San Francisco Bay within few weeks and will start its work from July and further will be extended accordingly.

The non-profit Dutch organization behind the project named Ocean Cleanup aims to introduce 60 huge floating scoops, all of which will stretch from end to end.

After every six to nine weeks, boats will come to collect the waste and fish will be able to escape the screens by crossing underneath.

Boyan Slat, the Dutch teen Prodigy, is the mastermind behind this proposed ambitious system. He has also presented his ocean cleaning machine at a TEDx talk six years ago.

Apart from skepticism from other scientists, he pursued this venture and dropped out of his college. He got $2.2 million from crowdfunding campaign and millions of other investors also supported him.

According to a recent research, the GPGP- Great Pacific Garbage Patch spans around 617,793 square miles and contains at least 79,000 tons of plastic. It was estimated the GPGP’s land is bigger than France, Germany, and Spain combined together.

Majority of it is made by “ghost gear” as it contains parts of abandoned and lost fishing gear, which includes nets and ropes that too from illegal fishing boats. More than 100,000 whales, dolphins, and seals are killed by ghost gear each year. Not only this, scientists have claimed that many of the sea creatures get strangled, drowned or mutilated by this plastic.

Technically, it is referred to as the eastern Pacific Garbage Patch because of another vast collection of waste in the western Pacific. In the oceans’ four other circular currents or gyres, similar gatherings can be found with one patch each in the Indian Ocean and the South Pacific and two in the Atlantic.

The GPGP is not the only one floating chunk of waste in our oceans.

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