The Great Pacific Garbage Patch “It was a feat we were pleasantly surprised to achieve. When people say something is impossible, the sheer absoluteness of that statement should be a motivation to investigate further.” In 2021, the team at The Ocean Cleanup, consisting of 120 engineers, researchers, scientists and more, made Boyan’s concepts into a reality with the new and improved System 002, which is currently harvesting every little bit of rubbish across kilometres of open ocean, including tiny onemillimetre microplastics. Boyan said the trash collected by the clean-up system is dumped on the ships pulling the barriers and brought back to shore once a month, where it is processed and recycled into new products. Using the ocean plastic, the organisation created and sold sunglasses with 100 percent of the proceeds going back towards their clean-up efforts. “We have been able to recycle it into a high quality, useful product; something which was always considered impossible because of the complex nature of ocean plastic. “But there is something else we tried to achieve with this model, to show how plastic can be used responsibly. What we’ve been able to accomplish with these sunglasses I hope will already raise the bar of what it means for a product to be sustainable,” he said. Thanks to the persistence and passion of Boyan, The Ocean Cleanup has successfully cleansed over 500,000 football fields worth of ocean. On top of this, they have also collected over 100,000 kilograms of trash from the largest build-up of ocean plastics on earth, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Boyan said they started solely concentrating Basically, just picture a mass of garbage about the size of the entire state of Queensland floating in the middle of the ocean and trapped circling in currents between Japan and the U.S.A. • It is the largest of five offshore plastic garbage patches on earth • According to studies conducted by The Ocean Cleanup, 86 percent of the rubbish comes from fishing activities, with 84 percent containing toxic chemicals. • It is estimated the plastics in the patch originate mainly from Japan, China and the USA. on cleaning up the garbage patch because they felt it was the most neglected environmental problem of them all. “The waste is mostly in international waters that are sort of in no man’s land, and thus considered to be not one nation’s problem. “It’s a very strange experience to be four or five days from the closest point of land, and you see more plastic than you have in your life.” Not only does The Ocean Cleanup believe in removing plastics from the oceans, but also in halting the trash flow from the rivers, which are the main source of ocean plastic pollution. Boyan said the rivers are the arteries that carry waste from the land to the ocean, and that preventing pollution is just as important as cleaning it up. “We absolutely need to clean up the plastic that’s already in the ocean. It won’t go away by itself. But we do also need to make sure that no more plastic enters the oceans in the first place. These things should go hand in hand,” he said. In 2017 the organisation invented the Interceptor 001, a river clean-up system that is placed at the mouths of rivers and completely stops the flow of rubbish to our oceans. Today, multiple iterations of the technology are placed in various locations across Malaysia, USA, Indonesia, and more. The organisation hopes to eventually install versions of the Interceptor across the 1000 top polluting rivers that are responsible for roughly 80 percent of ocean pollution. The Ocean Cleanup is currently conceptualising the third iteration of the clean-up system that is planned to completely rid our ocean of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. System 03 will be comprised of three vessels hauling a huge 2,500-meter-wide barrier system and will also rely on drones to locate garbage hot spots. Over the next few months the organisation is planning on creating a fleet of 10 System 03’s. A massive project to say the least. With their innovative new technology, Ocean Cleanup boldly aims to remove 90 percent of floating plastic by 2040. The non-profit organisation is solely funded through donations and sponsorships, and hopefully when the media sorts out its environmental priority issues, more people will be exposed to the wonderful work that Boyan has done, and more people will be inspired to donate or find solutions of their own to keep those annoying plastic bottles off of our beaches. “It will be very hard to convince everyone in the world to handle their plastics responsibly, but what we humans are very good in, is inventing technical solutions to our problems. “For society to progress, we should not only move forward but also clean up after ourselves,” Boyan said. <strong>SB</strong> / #54 / 60
61 / #54 / <strong>SB</strong> “It’s a very strange experience to be four or five days from the closest point of land, and you see more plastic than you have in your life,” Boyan said.
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