In the Pacific, very few people know that there is a great big island of trash floating on the waves. These had accumulated as time passed by; it's gotten so big that it's already the size of a country. Fortunately, efforts to clean up the country-sized garbage has started to kick into overdrive.
The ambitious project has been labelled as the 'Ocean Cleanup' project, and it's an undertaking to remove the garbage floating on the waves of the Pacific. The project, according to CNN, will tow a 'system' out to sea, where the machine will start trying to clean the garbage floating on the ocean. It is a 2,000 foot floating barrier with a skirt of about 10 foot floating underneath the waves.
From a distance, it looks like a pool noodle, but a really long one that rivals the length of the skyscrapers found in Manhattan. The tube floated from San Francisco, California, where it will be pulled for about 240 nautical miles, where it will be observed. It is hoped that when it meets the garbage, it has turned into a U-shape, molded by the wind and waves, where it will start corralling the plastic and garbage floating above the water.
The project is a brainchild of 24-year-old Boyan Slat. The Dutch innovator has always been aware of the amount of garbage floating in the Pacific Ocean. It has already been collected in regions that are called 'gyres' but the trash is still growing. The cleanup system will attempt to significantly reduce the trash in the largest region of that 'gyre,' the so-called 'Great Pacific Garbage Patch.'
Business Insider reports that the project is looking at five years-five years to potentially go to and return to the Garbage Patch. Once the garbage is collected, they will be brought onshore, in countries where they can be recycled. The goal is to significantly reduce the amount of the garbage patch to as low as 50% of its current size in only those five years.
While the idea is sound and the science accurate, there are still those who think it is designed to fail. A particular challenge would be to collect garbage and not fish; another is to prove that it won't fail just when the world really needs it to work.
