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Ocean Cleanup team heads to the Pacific
Why it is in news?
- A supply ship towing a long floating boom designed to corral ocean plastic has set sail from San Francisco for a test run ahead of a trip to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
- The ambitious project by The Ocean Cleanup, a Dutch non-profit group, hopes to clean up half of the infamous garbage patch within five years once all systems are deployed.
- The supply vessel was towing a 600 meter-long boom device dubbed System 001, designed to contain floating ocean plastic so it can be scooped up and recycled.
- The system includes a tapered three-meter skirt to catch plastic floating just below the surface.
- The ship was heading to a spot 240 nautical miles off the California coastline for a two-week trial before sailing to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a floating trash pile twice the size of France that swirls in the ocean halfway between California and Hawaii.
- The main mission is to show that it works, and hopefully then in a few months from now, the first plastics will arrive back into port, which means that it becomes proven technology.
Plastic waste
- They believe the Pacific garbage patch contains some 80,000 metric tones of plastic waste.
- Plastic has started to accumulate in the ocean since the 1950s
- He said that scientists first learned about the plastic concentrating in the Pacific garbage patch in the 1970s.
- Land-based plastic comes mainly from rivers
(GPGP)
- The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is the largest of the five offshore plastic accumulation zones in the world’s oceans.
- It is located halfway between Hawaii and California.
Source
The Hindu