San Francisco: World’s first marine cleansing system launched
The Ocean Cleanup, a Dutch non-profit organization developing technologies to clean the oceans of plastic, launched the world’s first marine protection system from San Francisco Bay on September 8, 2018
The cleaning system (“System 001”) heads for a two-week test to a site 240 nautical miles off the coast before continuing its journey to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch to start cleaning. The “System 001” is towed by the ship “Maersk Launcher” from the San Francisco Bay.
The system is used in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the world’s largest collection of marine plastic. Located halfway between Hawaii and California, this plastic continent contains about 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic and covers an area twice the size of the state of Texas.
First plastics should be collected and landed within 6 months of use. This is the first time that levitating plastic at sea has been successfully collected. Once the plastic has been returned to land, The Ocean Cleanup plans to recycle the material and contribute the proceeds to finance the refurbishment work.
Boyan Slat, founder and CEO of The Ocean Cleanup, said: “I am incredibly grateful for the tremendous support we have received over the last few years from people around the world who have enabled us to develop a system testing and launching, which has the potential to mitigate this ecological catastrophe, which makes me confident that, if we succeed in getting the technology up and running, the cleaning will take place.”
If the system’s initial deployment is successful, The Ocean Cleanup plans to deploy approximately 60 systems focused on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch over the next two years. Ocean Cleanup predicts that the entire fleet can remove half of the plastic in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch within five years. This is in line with the organization’s ambitious goal of reducing the amount of plastic in the oceans by at least 90% by 2040.

More information: www.theoceancleanup.com.
This article is courtesy of https://blog.divessi.com/san-francisco-worlds-first-marine-cleansing-system-launched-3982.html