FLOATING BOOM

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OCEAN ENGINEERING - Like a giant fishing net that floats on the ocean, this boom of inflatable tubes is designed to use ocean currents to trap plastic. This apparently depends on the relative speeds of the boom in relation to the prevailing currents. It is unclear how the trapped plastic will be collected and recycled or disposed of.

No matter what the present state of the art, the fact that this giant rubber (actually HDPE) tube found its way out into the Pacific is nothing short of a miracle. It has taken something like $30 million dollars of private funding, and EU2 million euros of crowd funding to make this happen over 5 year period. Boyan Slat began this project when he was 19. At the age of 24 he is making good progress. You cannot expect something so radical to be right first time. The bouncing bomb didn't work to begin with, Barnes Wallace had to perfect it. This is a war, a war against waste. The enemy is all around us, in the countries who allow their population to tip plastic into the sea. It takes a few trial and error experiments to get something untested to work.

The might of the G20 and the United Nations has so far proved to be ineffective. Their member nations simply will not pay for the development needed to get the cleanup ball rolling, despite collecting taxes from companies who are making the plastic and turning a profit from the waste that they are creating. It is total denial and irresponsible management on the part of G20 member nations. To our mind not only maladministration, but also multiple abuses of process. These countries have a system in place that has no flexibility as a safety net to fix things when they get it wrong. This goes for climate change also. It has taken mass protests and even children going on strike from school, before seeing some action - and even then we still do not have agreed and enforceable carbon emission targets from the Paris or Katowice COP party conferences.

If Slat and his engineers can get the boom system to work, we might not need to press ahead with the SeaVax. We'd only need a RiverVax perhaps - but the demand for that may not make it worth expending the development time where we also have climate change and acid oceans to consider. It's a 'hedge your bets,' or maybe 'hold your breath' moment that's for sure. Should SeaVax not be needed, we might concentrate our limited resources on testing zero carbon hulls for a future fleet of clean cargo ships. This is of course just as worthwhile a goal as plastic free oceans - and with that in mind most of our research to date on plastic cleaning will not go to waste.

FOX NEWS 6 JANUARY 2019 - LOS ANGELES – A trash collection device deployed to corral plastic litter floating in the Pacific Ocean between California and Hawaii has broken apart and will be hauled back to dry land for repairs.

Boyan Slat, who launched the Pacific Ocean cleanup project, told NBC News last week that the 2,000-foot long floating boom will be towed 800 miles to Hawaii.

If it can't be repaired there, it will be loaded on a barge and returned to its home port of Alameda, Calif.

The boom broke apart under constant wind and waves in the Pacific.

Slat said he's disappointed, but not discouraged and pledged that operations would resume as soon as possible.

"This is an entirely new category of machine that is out there in extremely challenging conditions," the 24-year-old Dutch inventor said. "We always took into account that we might have to take it back and forth a few times. So it's really not a significant departure from the original plan."

Previously Slat said the boom was moving slower than the plastic, allowing the trash to float away.

A ship towed the U-shaped barrier in September from San Francisco to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch - an island of trash twice the size of Texas. It had been in place since the end of October.

The plastic barrier with a tapered 10-foot-deep screen is intended to act like a coastline, trapping some of the 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic that scientists estimate are swirling in the patch while allowing marine life to safely swim beneath it.

Slat has said he hopes one day to deploy 60 of the devices to skim plastic debris off the surface of the ocean.

OCEAN ALLIES - Boyan Slat's Ocean Cleanup Project continues with this floating boom being deployed in the North Sea for test purposes. Such endeavour can only be applauded and must be supported to see what is possible using this technology.

PROJECT HISTORY 2012 - 2020

2012 - TED Talk

2013 - Company Formation

2014 - Concept Revisions

2015 - Scale Model Tests

2016 - North Sea Trial

2017 - Pipe Size Reduction

2018 - Wilson & Scale Test

2019 - Sea Trials Pacific

2020 - The Future

OCEAN CLEANUP PROJECTS

* Aliance to end Plastic Waste

* Boyan Slat's ocean booms

* 4Ocean recycled plastic bracelets

* Kulo Luna graphic novel

* Ocean Voyages Institute

* Ocean Waste Plastic

* Seabin

* Sea Litter Critters

* SeaVax autonomous drones

* World Oceans Day

LINKS & REFERENCE

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/08/04/important-least-try-can-23-year-old-clear-oceans-plastic-waste/

https://www.theepochtimes.com/massive-boom-hopes-to-clean-up-pacific-oceans-plastic-trash_2656514.html

https://www.theoceancleanup.com/

https://www.foxnews.com/science/huge-trash-collection-boom-in-pacific-ocean-breaks-apart

MARINE LIFE - This humpback whale is one example of a magnificent animal that is at the mercy of human activity. Humans are for the most part unaware of the harm their fast-lane lifestyles are causing. We aim to change that by doing all we can to promote ocean literacy.

 This website is provided on a free basis as a public information service. Copyright © Cleaner Oceans Foundation Ltd (COFL) (Company No: 4674774) 2019. Solar Studios, BN271RF, United Kingdom. COFL is a charity without share capital. The names Amphimax™ RiverVax™ and SeaVax™ are trademarks.