The floating barrier 600 meters long and 3 meters high supposed to clean the ocean of its plastic waste finally managed to pick up some plastic. But the march is high for an invention which, after seven years, is still far from having proved its effectiveness.
The non-profit company Ocean Cleanup, founded by Dutchman Boyan Slat, who was only a teenager seven years ago, was proud to announce on October 2, photo support, its first "harvest" of plastic waste, somewhere in the huge "big garbage area of the Pacific" (Great Pacific Garbage Patch) located between California and Hawaii. However, the group did not specify how much waste they had harvested, claiming that this information was "not relevant".
The purpose of the experiment was to prove that the system, a kind of giant buoy dragged by a boat, could pick up trash: a first experiment, last winter, had ended in failure. The new version, more stable than the previous one, left the port of San Francisco in September.
But the idea has been facing oceans of skepticism for seven years: on the one hand, it remains to prove that this structure can take a long time, in the face of violent onslaught of ocean currents and larger waste. On the other hand, the concept would be much more likely to make a difference if it were applied to the mouths of the world's major rivers, or before the majority of plastic waste dumped into the oceans.
Not to mention that in the middle of the ocean, once the waste is harvested, a boat must tow them to the nearest port, hundreds if not thousands of kilometers.
What is erroneously called a "island" or a "continent" of plastic, is in fact a marine territory of more than a million and a half square kilometers in which 2 000 billion pieces of plastic of all sizes totaling 80 billion would float. 000 tonnes.
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https://www.lapresse.ca/actualites/environnement/201910/09/01-5244754-pacifique-la-marche-vers-la-recolte-de-plastique-est-encore-haute.php
