The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the infamous patch of garbage approximately the size of France floating in the Pacific Ocean between Hawaii and the mainland United States, is an ever-growing ecological crisis.
However, hope for amending the marine environmental tragedy is alive thanks to a new conservation effort.
Boyan Slat, a 24-year-old Dutch inventor and CEO of the Ocean Cleanup project, oversaw the launching of a new test project called Project 001 out of San Francisco Bay this past Saturday. It is expected to reach the Great Pacific Garbage Patch sometime in mid-October.
Slat created the Ocean Cleanup project when he was a 16-year-old after scuba diving in the Mediterranean Sea and seeing more plastic items than fish.
Project 001 is composed of a ship that is expected to be the first of a fleet of 60 ships that drag along a 2,000 foot (600 meter) net that reaches about ten feet into the ocean.
The net is said to be weather resistant and can stay in oceanic conditions for about twenty years.
The vessel will be monitored via cameras, sensors, and satellites, and separate cargo ships will take excess garbage and plastic to recycling centers on shore every few months.
Using solar powered lighting, the advanced tracking systems keeping a watch on Project 001 will also ensure that the boat does not collide with other crafts.
Providing the full fleet is launched, it is predicted that half of the debris in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch will be eliminated in the next five years, and could reduce the size of the plastic conglomerate by 2040. Some estimates claim that some pieces of garbage in the patch have been aimlessly floating in the ocean for about 50 years.
Some skeptics are concerned with the negative implications of Project 001, claiming that the vessel will be harmful to aquatic life, luring organisms such as fish to untimely deaths.
However, some speculate that playing noises will deter marine life from the nets. Project 001’s interactions with ocean life will be closely monitored by marine biologists to note its ecological implications, and has been said to have a “flow system” that would supposedly clear marine life from the trajectory of the vessel.
“I’m the first to acknowledge this has never been done before and that it is important to collect plastic on land and close the taps on plastic entering into the ocean,” Slat says. “But I also think humanity can do more than one thing at a time to tackle this problem.”
For the Ocean Cleanup project, cleaning up ocean plastic is not a panacea for alleviating the threats to Earth’s seas, but a step in the right direction, furthermore stating that ocean plastic will not go away unless it is acted upon.