Or at least 80% of the trash that is polluting the oceans are coming from rivers. They've identified 1,000 rivers which most of the garbage is coming from.
The Ocean Cleanup organization's goal is to have barges sucking up trash in all 1,000 rivers by the year 2025. That will effectively stop the growing trashification of our oceans.
You can see the trash going up the conveyor belt in one of the solar barges:
They'll keep those barges working and then concentrate even more on cleaning up the huge ocean garbage dumps, the largest of which is known as The Great Pacific Garbage Patch and is over five miles across!
BUT, and I just found out about this...there are four more of them! They are smaller but still miles across. Yuck!
Can you believe that?
source
The amount of marine life killed each year by ingesting plastic is depressing but according to the Ocean Cleanup's projection they will have 90% of the plastic removed from the oceans by the year 2040.
That's too long but still..when you consider that this problem has been growing for decades and is now being reversed...that's something to celebrate.
The way they trap the trash is by putting up big, curved floating devices which extend down into the water and they have this rig anchored. Here's a diagram:
Here's another model that's catching trash:
The solar barge in a river:
This video explains how they work:
As with most of the major problems facing the world, there is a solution thanks to man's innovative spirit and developing technology. And we're making progress on almost all of them. This particular project needs more funding though.
I hope these countries that have the worst rivers in the world where the solar barges are operating don't dump even more trash in the rivers...you know, since they know the barges will clean them up anyway.
They wouldn't do that would they? Nah...people are better than that. lol.
Thanks for stopping by folks, God bless you all!
-jonboy
Texas
