Floating trash collector has setback in Pacific Garbage Patch
The Ocean Cleanup’s nearly 2,000-foot boom is collecting ocean plastics from the gigantic garbage gyre over the next year. But it has hit a snag.
By Laura Parker
PUBLISHED
ocean-cleanup-garbage-patch-01
Luzinterruptus is an anonymous art collective in Madrid that's been doing installation art with plastic waste all over the world. They started doing political illegal work and ironically this installation is paid for by City Hall in Madrid. They take the plastic trash of a town and then put it in the most beautiful areas of the city for everyone to contemplate what they are doing with one-use-plastic. The woman sorting recycled trash is Montaña who agreed to be photographed... other members of the collective prefer to remain anonymous but almost all the workers in the fountain are hired by city hall and not in the collective. The fountains are Neptune and Cibeles in Centro Madrid.
Photograph by RANDY OLSON, Nat Geo Image Collection
Update: The ocean cleanup contraption developed to collect plastic trash
from the Pacific Garbage Patch is being towed back to San Francisco during
the first week of January 2019 for repairs, after losing a 60-foot end
piece. The break was discovered during a routine inspection and is believed
to be caused by metal fatigue, though analysis is still underway. The 2,000-foot
boom, known as Wilson, is the creation of Boyan Slat, the Dutch entrepreneur
who launched it last September for a year-long series of tests. “We are
of course quite bummed about this,” Slat tweeted. “At the same time, we
also realize that setbacks like this are inevitable when pioneering new
technology at a rapid pace.” He described the setback as “teething troubles”
that are “solvable.” He also vowed that ”the cleanup of the Great Pacific
Garbage Patch will be operational in 2019.”
The campaign to rid the world’s oceans of plastic trash marked
a turning point last September as a giant, floating trash-collector steamed
out of San Francisco on a mission to clean up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
Over the course of the next year, the device will undergo the ultimate
tests and face some tough questions: Can technology prevail over nature?
Did the engineers at The Ocean Cleanup in
the Netherlands invent the first feasible method for extracting large amounts
of plastic debris from
the sea? Or will the wilds of the open Pacific tear it to shreds, turning
the cleaner itself into plastic trash? Alternately, even if a Pacific storm
does not devour the device, will it attract marine animals such as dolphins
and turtles and fatally entangle them?
“I don’t think it’s going to work, but I hope it does,” says George Leonard,
the Ocean Conservancy’s chief scientist. “The ocean needs all the help
it can get.”
The project is the creation of Boyan Slat, a 24-year-old Dutch college dropout who raised more than $30 million on a...