Will a Marine Plastic Harvester Shrink the World’s Giant Floating Garbage Patches?

These gifs show the latest concept from a project called The Ocean Cleanup to retrieve some of the millions of tons of plastic waste choking the world’s oceans.

The idea is to deploy long floating barriers at mid-ocean gyres that naturally collect garbage shed by land and ships. The booms would be set up so that the motion of ocean currents would do the work to corral plastics in concentrated areas, where a solar-powered collection platform would extract the waste for recycling.

The group, which is led by 20-year-old founder Boyan Slat and includes volunteer oceanography and engineering specialists, estimates it will cost a little less than $5 per kilogram to remove the garbage. They have already completed a proof-of-concept project demonstrating their design and conducted a feasibility study, in which they estimate that each garbage patch that has developed in the world’s five major gyres could be reduced by half within 10 years. The people behind The Ocean Cleanup hope to launch a coastal pilot study sometime in 2016 and to start full-scale operations in late 2019. Learn more and see a video below.

Whether it is this concept or another, something needs to be done. Currently, somewhere between 5 and 13 million metric tons of plastic waste enter the ocean every year. If the growth in plastic refuse goes unchecked, the total could amount to around 155 million tons annually by 2025. While this plastic creates physical hazards for oceanic life, they also break down into toxic pollutants that travel through the food chain. The debris also causes economic damage to fisheries, boat traffic and communities that must remove it from their beaches and wetlands.

Ocean Cleanup’s tests and modelling suggest that their boom and platform removal system should capture about 80 percent of the plastic it encounters. But does this method also collect the micron- to millimeter-sized fragments of plastic that are thought to be particularly dangerous to marine ecosystems?