Dutch inventor aims to harness the waves to clean up the seas

AFP: The Dutch inventor of a ground-breaking project to remove millions of tonnes of plastics floating in ‘great garbage patches’ in the oceans Wednesday unveiled his first prototype to help clean up the seas.

Boyan Slat’s innovative idea – first drawn on a paper napkin when he was still in high school – seeks to use ocean currents to gather up the mass of bottles, plastic crates and other detritus sullying the planet’s waters, instead of going out on an army of boats to haul it in.

“All those plastic objects, big things like bottles, crates, etc will be cut down to micro pieces over the next few decades if we don’t do anything about it,” he told reporters in The Hague explaining his project The Ocean Cleanup.

“The question is: is this a future we accept will happen or do you want to create a future where the oceans become clean again?”

According to the Ocean Cleanup project, eight million tonnes of plastics enter the oceans every year, much of which has accumulated in five garbage patches, with the largest in the Pacific between California and Hawaii.

The micro pieces released as the plastics break down are dispersed through the seas, entering the food chain with harmful effects for all marine life.

But the 21-year-old believes his project can harness the power of the currents to help the great cleanup.

“Why move through the ocean if the ocean can move through you?” Slat asked at the press conference in the harbour in the port of Scheveningen, on the outskirts of The Hague.

His idea is a 100-kilometre (60-mile) long V-shaped barrier made up of large buoys which floats on the ocean, trailing a three-metre (nine-foot) long curtain from its arms into the water.

The aim is to stop the plastic as it bobs along, gathering into one place so it can then be gathered up into a container and taken for recycling.

A smaller 100-metre (feet) prototype unveiled Wednesday will be taken out into the North Sea on Thursday for a year-long series of tests some 23 kilometres (12 nautical miles) off the Dutch coast.

Slat’s hope is to fully deploy the system in 2020.

“With a single one of those systems deployed for 10 years, we should be able to clean up about half the Great Pacific Garbage Patch or more if we would deploy more systems,” he told reporters.