A non-profit has removed more than 100,000 kg of plastic from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (GPGP).
Finally, some good news for our little blue planet.
The Ocean Cleanup, an organisation dedicated to developing technologies to rid of plastic in the ocean, reached the impressive milestone earlier this week.
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The Ocean Clean announced via a press release that they had cleaned nearly 1/1000 of the GPGP, which is more than the combined weight of two Boeing 737-800s.
Today we reached an exciting milestone: over 100,000kg of plastic removed from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch - more than the combined weight of two and a half Boeing 737-800s. Here's Boyan illustrating what this looks like in terms of plastic we extracted from the GPGP:
Since August last year, System 002 or ‘Jenny’ known to the rest of the non-profit, began harvesting plastic from the GPGP, which is located in the North Pacific Ocean.
Now with System 002 concluding, The Ocean Cleanup will enter into its next phase, where they hope to remove plastic from the GPGP 10 times higher in System 003.
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They wrote: “Now our technology is validated, we are ready to move on to our new and expanded System 003, which is expected to capture plastic at a rate potentially 10 times higher than System 002 through a combination of increased size, improved efficiency and increased uptime.”
According to their website, the organisation found in a 2018 study that the total amount of accumulated plastic is 79,000,000 kg, or 100,000,000 kg if the Outer GPGP is included.
However, by repeating a 100,000 kg removal haul 1,000 times, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch will be gone.
They might also want to enlist the help of the ‘Great Bubble Barrier’, a Dutch invention that uses bubbles to trap plastic waste in rivers.
The Great Bubble Barrier removes waste by creating a wall of bubbles by pumping air through a tube on the bottom of the waterway. This generates a screen of bubbles, blocking plastics and redirecting them to the surface.
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The barrier is laid diagonally across the water and guides waste to the side into the catchment system.
The company states via their website that they were motivated to do something as ‘more and more plastic is floating in our oceans and seas’.
They added: “It comes from rubbish that we throw away on the street, fishnets that are discarded, and from washing synthetic clothing and brushing our teeth.
“All these different types of plastic together form the plastic soup in the seas and oceans.”
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With the little help of these oceanic warriors, we might just have clear waters after all.
Featured Image Credit: The Ocean Cleanup / Twitter.Topics: Good News, News, Environment