New system pulls more than eight tonnes of plastic from Pacific Ocean
VICTORIA — About eight tonnes of plastics have been hauled
out of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in the first of two six-week tests of a
new trash-collecting system.
Expedition organizers are hoping to see their system, dubbed
Jenny, collect far more plastics from the Pacific in the next phase of their
trial.
If all goes well, the system will be able to capture 10 to
12 tonnes of plastic at a time, Joost Dubois, director of communications for
The Ocean Cleanup, said Thursday.
The non-profit organization, based in the Netherlands and
working out of Ogden Point, hopes to clean up 90 per cent of the plastics in
the world’s oceans.
The Maersk Tender and Maersk Trader ships carried 45 crew
to the large stretch of the north Pacific where debris has accumulated and are
back in Victoria for a crew change, additional technical work and to package up
the recovered plastics.
The vessels will return to the patch in coming days and are
expected to return to Victoria on Oct. 20.
Boyan Slat founded The Ocean Cleanup in 2013 to develop new
technologies to combat the global problem of plastics in the seas. Sea life
that ingests or becomes trapped in plastics can die. Plastic also breaks down
in the ocean into micro sizes and works its way through the food chain.
Slat said on social media after the first phase of the
testing that the system is “behaving well.”
“We see significant amounts of trash coming on deck from the
first few short tests that we have done so far,” Slat said.
The Jenny extraction system is 800 metres long and has a
three-metre-deep skirt under water to capture plastic under the surface.
Various configurations have been tried in the effort to collect a large amount
of plastics efficiently without harming marine life.
One goal of testing is to learn whether the system poses any
risks for marine life, and to prevent it from being disrupted.
There was a hiccup when the monitoring device for marine
life stopped working properly in the first phase of the trial. Tests were
halted until it could be fixed, Dubois said.
That device has now been revamped in Victoria. It is mounted
on a rectangular-shaped base and includes cameras, solar panels and motion
detectors, ready to use in the expanded second phase of the trial.
In the next phase, imitation plastic garbage in the form of
buoys will be tagged and monitored in the ocean using drones and GPS trackers
to see if it’s possible to increase the predictability of how plastic ends up
being captured within the system.
Phase two will see continued testing of the system on a
larger scale. The total operational hours will be increased in order to
completely fill the system with plastics, something not done in the initial
testing stage.
Based on what “we have seen so far, we think that within
five days we will completely fill it up, and that will bring 10 to 12 tons of
plastic on board in one go,” Dubois said.
The system will be lifted onto the ship and opened up to
deposit the plastic — like thousands of fish being released from a net above
the ship’s deck.
Plastics pulled from the ocean in the first trial have been
packed in large boxes to take to Europe for recycling, Dubois said.
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