The Ocean Cleanup

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The Ocean Cleanup
legal form Foundation
founding 2013
founder Boyan Slat
Seat Delft , NetherlandsNetherlandsNetherlands 
main emphasis Cleansing the oceans of plastic
Managing directors Boyan Slat
Employees 90 (2020)
Website www.theoceancleanup.com
Boyan Slat (2018), founder of The Ocean Cleanup

The Ocean Cleanup is a project by the Dutch born in 1994 and aerospace engineering student Boyan Slat from Delft to collect plastic waste in the oceans . Over 100 researchers worked on the feasibility study , and they came to the conclusion that the project was worthwhile. Uninvolved experts, on the other hand, doubted the information provided by the initiative and the benefits of the project.

Ocean cleaning

Prototypes

The trigger for the project was a vacation in Greece in 2011 , during which Slat saw more trash than fish while diving at the age of 16. In October 2014, the crowdfunding started in June by around 40,000 supporters reached the required 2 million US dollars . The concept presented at the TEDx conference and developed at the Technical University of Delft originally consisted of 50 km long, V-shaped tubes that float on the surface of the sea, remain in place thanks to weights on the seabed, and 90 percent of the floating plastic waste from one should collect size of 20 mm, which (as of 2014) 50 euros depending on recycling due tonne delivered and not by collecting to micro plastic decomposes. Most of the plastic waste drifts in the top 3 meters of the ocean.

On May 20, 2015, the company announced on its website that a prototype would go into operation in the second quarter of 2016 off the coast of Tsushima , an island between Japan and South Korea . At 2,000 m in length, it should be the longest man-made structure on an ocean and be in service for at least two years.

In fact, on June 22, 2016, a 100-meter-long prototype went into operation off the Dutch North Sea coast . Further prototypes followed in 2017 and 2018. In the course of development, the aim was not to strive for a large, firmly anchored system, but a fleet of smaller systems that drifted with the wind and current.

Principle, top view
A - navigation platform
B - satellite
platform C - camera platform
Principle, side view
A - wind
B - waves
C - current
D - swimming barrier

System 001

Starting May 19, 2018, a 120-meter-long system 50 nautical miles from the Golden Gate Bridge was tested on the open sea for about two weeks  . This system is part of the 600 meter long "System 001".

The 600 meter long float was built from extruded PE 100 RC pipes. A kind of apron or fin was attached to the pipe string to catch the plastic floating up to 3 meters below the surface of the water. After the complete system was assembled in the Bay of San Francisco , it was towed into the Pacific by ship on September 8, 2018. After two weeks of testing in the open sea, it was brought into the North Pacific Vortex from the beginning of October , where it was commissioned on October 17th. In December, the initiative announced that the system was not yet working as hoped and could not hold on to the plastic it had picked up. The team returned to shore with 2,200 kilos of collected plastic. At the beginning of January 2019 it became known that an 18-meter-long end piece of the pipe system had also come loose and the entire system was to be towed ashore for repair. Over the next few months, adjustments were made to improve the stability of the system and its ability to collect plastic, and to be able to use it again in June as System 001 / B. At the end of June, the modified system reached the North Pacific vortex again, where the next test phase began. A system only 160 meters long was used for testing purposes during this period, but the target size for the final system is still 600 meters.

The next test results were announced in August 2019: The system was either slowed down or accelerated in order to always achieve a speed difference to the ocean and the plastic floating in it, thus preventing plastic from escaping from the system. Braking using a sea ​​anchor has proven to be a more effective variant. However, an adjustment has to be made within the U-shaped system so that the plastic does not wash over the screen on which it is supposed to collect. A corresponding modification is already on the way. On October 2nd it was announced that System 001 / B was now able to capture plastic as planned, including plastic as small as 1 mm. The next step will be to develop System 002, which should also have the full target size.

Environmental impact

The aim of the project is to collect the plastic that has got into the oceans and thus to reverse or reduce its negative effects. Numerous animals die by starving to death with plastic-filled stomachs or by getting caught in floating garbage, and microplastics can release toxic substances, accumulate in the food chain and thus get back on land and cause further damage there.

However, negative side effects are also feared, as the collection systems together with the garbage could also capture organisms ( Neuston ) living directly under the water surface and thus damage the ecosystem. The Ocean Cleanup referred to the voluntary environmental impact assessment and to the fact that the collection facilities in the garbage whirlpools should only cover a small part of the Neuston habitat. Neuston can also reproduce quickly enough to make up for losses, while failure to collect plastic could mean even greater damage to the Neuston. Against this, it was argued that plastic behaves in a similar way to Neuston, which is also drifting with the currents, and the rubbish vortex with the collection systems could therefore also be the places with the highest Neuston concentration. In addition, due to the lack of data and knowledge about Neuston, it is difficult to judge what consequences the cleanup project could have.

River cleaning

In October 2019, the Interceptor, an additional project that has been developed since 2015, was presented, which is intended to reduce further plastic input into the oceans. This is a collection system that can be anchored in rivers and is said to be able to capture 50,000 kilograms of plastic per day. According to The Ocean Cleanup, 1,000 rivers (about 1 percent) are responsible for about 80 percent of the plastic input and should be equipped with interceptors within five years. At this point, two interceptors in Indonesia and Malaysia were already in operation. Similar projects on a smaller scale already existed in Baltimore at this point . It was criticized that organic material could also be extracted from the rivers, which is important for their ecosystem , and that this project too would start too late and the introduction of plastic into the rivers would have to be prevented.

See also

literature

  • Steffan Heuer: The largest water filter in the world. In: Technology Review June 2018, pp. 56–60

Web links

Commons : The Ocean Cleanup  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Josephine Pabst: The idea of ​​a 20-year-old could clear the oceans , Die Welt, October 24, 2014
  2. ↑ Dagmar Dehmer: Plastic Garbage in the Sea - Die Müllfischer , Der Tagesspiegel from July 25, 2014
  3. ↑ a b Laura Waßermann: Two million dollars for the ocean savior , Handelsblatt from October 21, 2014
  4. ↑ TOC Feasibility study V2.0 , Delft, 2014
  5. ↑ Jennifer Fraczek: THE OCEAN CLEANUP: A garbage collector for the seas , golem.de of April 21, 2015
  6. ↑ Andrea Hofrichter: Great cleaning starts in the Pacific , Sueddeutsche.de on September 7, 2018
  7. ↑ a b Lydia Klöckner: Plastic in the ocean - How a 19-year-old wants to free our seas from garbage , star of June 13, 2014
  8. ↑ a b Tobias Finger: The Ocean Cleanup - This student wants to free the oceans from plastic waste , WiWo Green of June 24, 2014
  9. ↑ Joachim Wille: Merging for the Environment , Frankfurter Rundschau of October 8, 2014
  10. ↑ a b Caroline Winter: This Dutch Wunderkind Now Has the Funds to Build His Ocean Cleanup Machine , Bloomberg Businessweek , September 16, 2014
  11. ↑ Sarah Zierul: Environmental Protection - Researchers warn against ocean filters , Süddeutsche Zeitung from August 20, 2014
  12. ↑ Blog entry on theoceancleanup.com. Retrieved June 11, 2015 .
  13. ^ North Sea Prototype. theoceancleanup.com, accessed July 17, 2016 .
  14. ↑ The floating garbage barrier fishes away plastic. n-tv.de, June 23, 2016, accessed on July 17, 2016 .
  15. ^ New North Sea prototype successfully deployed. theoceancleanup.com, August 31, 2017, accessed December 7, 2018 .
  16. ↑ Unscheduled Learning Opportunities on the North Sea. theoceancleanup.com, February 20, 2018, accessed December 7, 2018 .
  17. ↑ Technology. theoceancleanup.com, accessed December 7, 2018 .
  18. ^ System 001 Tow Test Explained. theoceancleanup.com, accessed July 2, 2018 .
  19. ^ The Ocean Cleanup: Road to the cleanup , accessed August 14, 2018.
  20. ↑ agru Kunststofftechnik mbH: production of the float for "The Ocean Cleanup". Retrieved December 19, 2018 .
  21. ^ "The Ocean Cleanup": Garbage collection campaign on the sea begins In: nzz.ch, September 9, 2018, accessed on September 10, 2018.
  22. ↑ Pacific Trials Results: System 001 is Go. theoceancleanup.com, October 5, 2018, accessed December 7, 2018 .
  23. ↑ Peter Kotecki, Aria Bendix: Hoe de 24-year-old Boyan Slat al 9 jaar werkt aan zijn droom om de plasticsoep in de oceaan op te ruimen - en niet van opgeven weet. In: Business Insider Nederland. May 28, 2019, accessed June 1, 2019 (Dutch).
  24. ↑ dpa: Provisional end for plastic waste catchers , Heise.de on January 3, 2019
  25. ↑ Tina Baier: Nobody saves us from plastic waste. In: sueddeutsche.de . January 4, 2019, accessed January 4, 2019 .
  26. ↑ System Design Upgrades Completed, to be Relaunched in June. theoceancleanup.com, May 24, 2019, accessed May 24, 2019 .
  27. ^ System 001 / B - The Mission Plan. theoceancleanup.com, June 27, 2019, accessed June 29, 2019 .
  28. ^ Into the Twilight Zone. theoceancleanup.com, August 16, 2019, accessed August 16, 2019 .
  29. ^ The Ocean Cleanup Successfully Catches Plastic in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. theoceancleanup.com, October 2, 2019, accessed October 2, 2019 .
  30. ↑ A floating device created to clean up plastic from the ocean is finally doing its job, organizers say. CNN , October 3, 2019, accessed November 1, 2019 .
  31. ↑ Big cleaning starts in the Pacific. Süddeutsche Zeitung , September 7, 2018, accessed on November 1, 2019 .
  32. ↑ From Fish to Humans, A Microplastic Invasion May Be Taking a Toll. Scientific American , September 4, 2018, accessed November 1, 2019 .
  33. ^ How Plastic Cleanup Threatens the Ocean's Living Islands. The Atlantic , January 22, 2019, accessed November 1, 2019 .
  34. ^ The Ocean Cleanup and the Neuston. theoceancleanup.com, February 6, 2019, accessed November 1, 2019 .
  35. ^ The Ocean Cleanup struggles to prove it will not harm sea life. deepseanews.com, February 13, 2019, accessed November 1, 2019 .
  36. ^ The Ocean Cleanup Unveils Plan to Address the Main Source of Ocean Plastic Pollution: Rivers. theoceancleanup.com, October 26, 2019, accessed October 26, 2019 .
  37. ↑ The Ocean Cleanup project is now cleaning plastic out of rivers to stop it from getting to the ocean. Fast Company , October 26, 2019, accessed November 1, 2019 .
  38. ↑ Ocean Cleanup's New Plastic Catcher… Kinda Already Exists? Wired , October 26, 2018, accessed November 1, 2019 .
  39. ↑ With the interceptor against plastic waste. Süddeutsche Zeitung , November 13, 2019, accessed on November 15, 2019 .
  40. ↑ Ingested. ZEIT ONLINE , March 11, 2020, accessed on March 15, 2020 .