Could recycling machinery hold the key to tackling ocean plastic?
If you’re listening to what the environmentalists are saying about the oceans, you will know that we have good cause to be worried. Ocean plastic buildup is killing more marine wildlife than ever before and it is reaching a critical point. Sea-life ingesting micro-plastics is causing many issues throughout the food chain and the plastic itself is causing large areas to become uninhabitable. Marine creatures being forced out of their natural habitats because of poisonous human waste floating around – that is an issue.
Thanks to recycling machinery that applies sciences like thermal depolymerization and pyrolysis, this ocean plastic does have a physical value. These technologies can turn plastic into crude oil or diesel and sell it back to the energy market. The issue is collecting the plastic from the ocean, of which much of it is microscopic and there are only loose estimates as to how much floating plastic is out there.
Recycling machinery is the easy part, that’s not the worry. The worry is how to collect the plastic without killing more fish or turtles, for example. Fortunately, Boyan Slat, a young Dutch entrepreneur came up with a solution a couple of years ago. His solar powered floating ocean cleaning system would act as a sort of net that worked with ocean currents to help the ocean clean itself. The first of his inventions is due to launch next year and will be 2km long.
This giant piece of floating recycling machinery is hoped to be the answer we’ve been looking for to rid the oceans of their plastic problem. Boyan made the bold claim that his invention could clean the oceans in five years, and why not? The first model is 2km long, but if it is successful, there are plans to create many more all around the world, including a 100km long system between Hawaii and California!
Boyan’s original claim of five years has been extended, mostly because it’s no simple task to build and prepare something like this. Floating in the pacific is a collection of plastic and other waste (like nets and ropes) that is estimated to be the size of Texas, or maybe bigger. That’s bigger than the United Kingdom. It’s estimated that it could take a decade to clean half of this patch, so perhaps twenty years to clean the whole thing, depending on the rate of growth from continued pollution.
That’s the other half of the problem. The waste is still being added to and coastal regions need to be educated that this simply cannot go on and that they are damaging their own water and seafood supplies. Boyan’s floating recycling machinery could change the planet for the better and truly is a young man’s brilliant solution to a problem that bothered him personally.
Listen to Boyan talk about The Ocean Cleanup in this Tedx talk: