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What can be done to clean up the ocean?

There are different systems to retrieve plastic waste. Mechanical systems can be effective at picking up large pieces of plastic, but micro plastics in the open ocean are virtually impossible to recover. This is why it is most important to prevent plastic from entering the ocean in the first place.

Here is are a few systems that try to extract plastic from the ocean:


River based systems (catch plastic from the rivers before it reaches the ocean):

  • The Interceptor, in Malaysia, Indonesia and the Dominican Republic - 50 tonnes or more of plastic waste a day

  • Mr. Trash Wheel, a smalle-scale, plastic-gathering invention that’s been in Baltimore City’s harbour since 2014.

  • Great Bubble Barrier in the Netherlands, intercepts waste with the help of a pipe, fitted with holes, and laid across riverbeds.

  • Azure, in Ecuador which uses a barrier to redirect waste onto conveyor belts, equipped with cameras that use algorithms to identify the plastic by type.

  • The Tactical Recovery System Hellas (TRASH), a boom which directs waste on the water surface into cages, just before it flows into the open ocean.

  • The Litterboom Project has deployed simple booms made of piping across rivers in South Africa.


Surveillance systems (identify locations of plastic pollution to effectively catch waste):

  • A project, by Xiamen University, using cameras to identify patterns in the movement of waste downriver in order to make daily forecasts about where plastic pollution is likely to flow the next day.

  • A lift-off of a drone fleet that’s mapping plastic pollution in rivers flowing into the highly-polluted Manila Bay.

  • The Ellipsis Earth project, which crowd-sources global footage produced by drones, satellites, submarines and even CCTV, and augments it with imagery from their own drones to identify locations of plastic pollution.

  • Th ESA, training Satellites to identify the unique optical signatures that plastic pollution creates.

Other solutions:

  • Take the Seabin Project which began small-scale in Australia. The idea is to distribute plastic-catching “garbage bins” to harbours, marinas and ports. These bins move with the tides, filtering seawater and capturing any floating waste within.

  • the WasteShark, an autonomous water drone, about the size of a canoe, that skims the calm waters of ports, harbours and marinas and gulps up any floating trash and polluting oils in its path.

  • floating robot called FRED, being developed by San Diego-based non-profit Clear Blue Sea, is designed to scoop up plastic waste offshore.

  • Hoola One, a Canadian invention to tackle the huge problem of microplastics embedded in beach sand. This hoover-like contraption sucks up sand, then uses a tank of water to separate floating microplastics from sinking natural material, which is returned to the beach.

  • In 2019, a 600-metre-long crescent-shaped boom was deployed in the Pacific Ocean to scoop up plastic from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch


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