How technology can help solve ocean plastic problem

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Companies use nets, satellite imagery and boats to monitor and reduce the amount of waste that ends up in the oceans. Plastic bottles pile up behind Ocean Cleanup’s Interceptor barrier in Kingston Harbour, Jamaica THE OCEAN CLEANUP Trying to solve the world’s problem of plastic pollution in the oceans has been a “long and painful journey” for Dutch entrepreneur Boyan Slat. The 28-year-old founder of the non-profit environmental organization The Ocean Cleanup has been working on different ways to filter plastic waste from the Pacific Ocean for nearly 10 years. He told BBC News the task has been more difficult than he imagined. “The planet is very big, it seems,” said Boyan. “There are about 1,000 rivers that we need to take care of and five garbage patches in the ocean, (so) the first few years were really about trying to understand the problem.” The world’s largest area of ​​plastic accumulating in the ocean, commonly dubbed “the Great Pacific Garbage Patch”, is located in the North Pacific Ocean. Containing a massive accumulation of plastic debris, from large fishing nets to flake-sized microplastics, the area has been a top target for The Ocean Cleanup team. Casting the Net The Ocean Cleanup uses a long, U-shaped, net-like barrier that is pulled by boats through patches of litter. The vehicle moves slowly to try and avoid harming marine life. Cameras powered by artificial intelligence (AI) are used to continuously scan the ocean’s surface for plastic and to calibrate the group’s computer models, helping it understand which areas of the Pacific to focus on. “When you look at the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, there are some areas that have a very high density of plastic and others that are practically empty,” he said. “If we continually clean within these hotspots, of course we can be much more effective in our operation.” The plastic collected by the 800-meter-long system, the second of its kind developed by the company, is periodically taken ashore and emptied for recycling. Ocean Cleanup crew sorting plastic on a ship’s deck after a garbage extraction THE OCEAN CLEANUP Boyan said the system has already cleaned nearly 200,000 kg of ocean plastic. While that’s just 0.2% of the 100 million kg of plastic contained in the world’s largest plastic waste patch, he said it’s still worth it: “Everything big starts small, right?” The team believes they will have collected 1% of that trash by the end of this year using their current system — but they are scaling up their operations to try to clean up the area more quickly. They are developing System 3, a giant barrier 1.5 miles long, for summer use. The Ocean Cleanup expects that deploying 10 of these larger systems in the near future could clean up to 80% of the North Pacific’s plastic debris by the end of the decade. Ocean Cleanup is developing a new cleaning system three times the size of the current one THE OCEAN CLEANUP Stemming the flow Research undertaken by the company in 2021 suggests that around 1,000 of the world’s rivers are the source of 80% of global ocean plastic pollution . “The rivers are really the arteries that carry waste from the land to the sea,” Boyan said. “Then, when it rains, the plastic is washed from the streets into the streams, into the rivers and finally into the ocean.” He says the fast-flowing nature of rivers could make stopping plastic even more difficult. “In rivers, you really only have one chance to catch the plastic – it just flows, and if you don’t catch it, it’s guaranteed to fall into the ocean,” he said. Trash builds up behind the barrier of an Interceptor system in Ballona Creek, Calif. THE OCEAN CLEANUP Ocean Cleanup uses its “Interceptor” solutions to try to collect trash from rivers before it reaches the sea. The technology behind this varies depending on factors such as the width, depth, flow velocity and type of river debris in question – again assessed using AI-powered cameras. Most deployments use a conveyor belt to extract waste from the water. “We’re intercepting plastic in 11 rivers around the world,” Boyan said, “but we intend to scale this up to all 1,000 of the world’s most polluting rivers.” ‘Turn off the tap’ Garbage filtered from the Klang River in Selangor, Malaysia moves along the conveyor belt of an interceptor THE OCEAN CLEANUP Professor Richard Lampitt of the National Center for Oceanography told BBC News in 2018 that he believed the using boats to haul nets and transport plastic from ocean litter patches to ports could have a high carbon cost. Several years later, he says he remains skeptical about it — but he feels much more positive about directing waste into rivers. “The environmental costs are much, much less,” he said. “You don’t need to travel 1,500 km to collect the material.” But, noting the risks of microplastics to the heart of the marine ecosystem, Professor Lampitt said he thought that rather than cleaning up the plastic in our seas, “it’s really a matter of turning off the tap and stopping this stuff from entering the ocean”. “I can’t think of any way to remove them from the ocean’s natural environment without causing massive damage to the food webs and, of course, consuming an enormous amount of energy to do so,” he said. Boyan said that he hopes there will be no further need for The Ocean Cleanup’s work in the future THE OCEAN CLEANUP While trying to tackle the problem of marine pollution worldwide is undoubtedly difficult and is primarily dependent on reducing the production and consumption of plastic, Boyan has high hopes for the future. “I truly believe that with these technologies to clean up the legacy of ocean pollution and intercept plastic in rivers before it reaches the oceans, we will actually be able to get rid of waste in the not-too-distant future,” he added.

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