• Ecology arrangement The Ocean Cleanup has been collecting plastic waste material using a 600-metre floating barrier.
  • The get-go haul of waste, cleared from the Swell Pacific Garbage Patch, has been returned to shore.
  • The 60 bags measuring ane cubic metre each contained everything from discarded line-fishing nets to microplastics.

The stats most ocean plastic are so stark and the problem so seemingly insurmountable, you lot could be forgiven for wondering what on Earth we're going to do about it.

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Just Dutch inventor Boyan Slat thinks he has a solution: a giant floating bulwark, or boom, that uses natural forces to passively scoop up the waste. And it seems to exist working in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (GPGP).

Number and weight of plastic pieces afloat at sea.

The corporeality of plastic in the earth's oceans

Epitome: Statista

Raft of ideas

After some simulated starts and six months of the barrier bobbing in the GPGP – an area between Hawaii and California almost three times the size of France – the system has returned sixty bags of trash to the shore in Vancouver.

Everything from massive discarded fishing nets to microplastics ane millimetre in size accept been caught in the bags, which measure 1 cubic metre each.

Operated by Slat's ecology start-up The Ocean Cleanup, the system consists of a 600-metre-long barrier that sits on the surface of the water as well as a skirt that prevents debris from escaping underneath. The air current, waves and current push button waste into the bulwark, which is slowed downwards by an ballast so information technology moves at slower speeds than the trash.

How the ocean cleanup works.

Natural forces sweep trash into the system, which is slowed down by an ballast to let it to trap the droppings.

Image: The Ocean Cleanup

A gyre purpose

The Ocean Cleanup says information technology could rid the GPGP of 50% of its waste in v years. Conventional methods of clearing the water, similar vessels and nets, would accept vast sums of money and thousands of years.

The surface area is the biggest sea garbage patch on the planet, simply information technology'due south simply 1 of v around the earth'due south major ocean gyres.

Similar boring-moving whirlpools, gyres play an of import role, circulating currents and redistributing the sun's free energy around the globe. Merely they as well suck in marine debris, turning vast areas of the ocean into plastic soup.

Plastic

What is the World Economic Forum doing about plastic pollution?

More than 90% of plastic is never recycled, and a whopping viii million metric tons of plastic waste matter are dumped into the oceans annually. At this charge per unit, at that place will be more than plastic than fish in the world'south oceans by 2050.

The Global Plastic Activity Partnership (GPAP) is a collaboration between businesses, international donors, national and local governments, community groups and world-class experts seeking meaningful actions to beat plastic pollution.

In Republic of ghana, for example, GPAP is working with technology giant SAP to create a group of more than two,000 waste pickers and measuring the quantities and types of plastic that they collect. This data is then analysed alongside the prices that are paid throughout the value chain past buyers in Ghana and internationally.

Information technology aims to testify how businesses, communities and governments can redesign the global "accept-make-dispose" economic system every bit a circular one in which products and materials are redesigned, recovered and reused to reduce environmental impacts.

Read more than in our bear upon story.

Nosotros're gonna need some robot boats

While The Ocean Cleanup'south success so far might seem like a drop in the ocean (pun intended) compared to the calibration of the problem, the system says it has proven the concept works.

And the project has even more ambitious goals. In what it calls "the largest body of water make clean-upwardly in history," information technology wants to remove 90% of ocean plastic pollution by 2040.

Information technology's also attempting to stop this pollution at its source: in the world's rivers. It has developed the "Interceptor," an autonomous, solar-powered catamaran that works in conjunction with a barrier to scoop plastic out of the water. Capable of extracting 50,000 kilogrammes of plastic a 24-hour interval, two of these arts and crafts are already at work, in Djakarta and Malaysia.

The Bounding main Cleanup wants to send Interceptors to one,000 rivers worldwide past 2025.

Smash or bust?

Whether these interventions are the respond to the world'south growing sea plastic problem remains to be seen. Some researchers merits that, as well as collecting trash, the boom design used in the GPGP could be chancy to floating marine life.

The organization says it has not observed any entrapment of marine animals, and people will always be present to check the h2o while waste is being extracted.

Plastic is now so ubiquitous in the natural environment that scientists are suggesting our era will go downwards in history equally the "Plastic Age."

But, with projects like The Ocean Cleanup working to find solutions, perhaps the plastic problem is not entirely insurmountable.