Massive boom to corral plastic in Pacific

[Nergal]

 

Engineers in the US will deploy a rubbish collection device to collect plastic litter floating between California and Hawaii in an attempt to clean up the world's largest rubbish patch in the heart of the Pacific Ocean.

The 600-metre long floating boom will be towed on Saturday from San Francisco to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an island of rubbish twice the size of Texas.

The system was created by The Ocean Cleanup, an organisation founded by Boyan Slat, a 24-year-old innovator from the Netherlands.

"The plastic is really persistent and it doesn't go away by itself and the time to act is now," Slat said, adding that researchers with his organisation found plastic going back to the 1960s and 70s bobbing in the patch.

The buoyant, a U-shaped barrier made of plastic and with a tapered 3m deep screen, is intended to act like a coastline, trapping some of the 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic that scientists estimate are swirling in that gyre but allowing marine life to safely swim beneath it.

Fitted with solar power lights, cameras, sensors and satellite antennas, the clean-up system will communicate its position at all times, allowing a support vessel to fish out the collected plastic every few months and transport it to dry land where it will be recycled, said Slat.

Shipping containers filled with the fishing nets, plastic bottles, laundry baskets and other plastic refuse scooped up by the system being deployed on Saturday are expected to be back on land within a year, he said.

The Ocean Cleanup, which has raised $US35 million ($A49 million) in donations to fund the project, including from Salesforce.com chief executive Marc Benioff and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, will deploy 60 free-floating barriers in the Pacific Ocean by 2020.