I recently saw a video that shows a great invention to clean the oceans.
Did you know that every year 8 million tonnes of plastic are thrown or fall into the sea? This waste kills a lot of marine animals, including turtles who think they eat a jellyfish and end up smothered ...
Many of these plastics and various wastes are transported with different ocean currents to the largest plastics dump in the world, and are located off the Hawaiian archipelago. This landfill is called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, this landfill is the size of six times France: 3.4 million square kilometers of land area for 22 200 kilometers in circumference.
These currents, under the influence of the rotation of the Earth, curl in a clockwise direction in the Northern Hemisphere and in the opposite direction in the Southern Hemisphere. The waste is sucked by these currents and they can accumulate up to 30 meters deep.
It is nicknamed the 7th continent, because there is so much compacted waste that we can walk on it.
These marine dump sites are time bombs. Greenpeace estimated that about a million birds and 100,000 sea turtles and mammals (seals, dolphins, whales, ...) die each year from the ingestion of plastic bits, either by suffocation or hunger, because their stomach stuffed with this material offers no room for food.
The smallest pieces of plastic, which are not swallowed by animals, mingle with plankton, composed of microscopic organisms: larvae, crustaceans, seaweeds, jellyfish ... This is a staple food for many small fish, molluscs and birds, not to mention whales and sharks.
Then, the men eat some of these marine animals, marine animals that have ingested plastics that contain mercury derivatives and endocrine disruptors that accumulate in the human body and disrupt the function of vital organs (heart, brain, kidneys, liver, ...).
The 21-year-old Dutch student Boyan Slat has developed an ingenious system for recovering plastic waste. The first tests are planned this year.
In June, a prototype will be tested in the North Sea, 23 km off the coast of the Netherlands. The net used will be 100 meters long.
A second test should follow off Tsushima Island, between Korea and Japan, a location where the ocean is particularly polluted. If the trials are successful, the team should then deploy large-scale nets into the Pacific Ocean by 2020.
Boyan Slat had the idea for his project after spending a holiday in Greece in 2011. There, he is struck by the number of plastic objects of all kinds that he sees in the water during an outing of scuba diving. He decides to react and launches the Ocean Cleanup project. He had a hard time making himself known and getting funding, like what, the cleaning of the oceans is not the main concern of many investors ... It does not pay enough I suppose ...
The next time you go swimming, if you ever see a bit of plastic or waste, pick it up and take it out of the water, it could save a lot of people; o) Or simply, if you see some on the beach or the edge of the coast, indeed, a simple gust of wind and these waste are found in the water.
