The Ocean Cleanup
Image source: The Ocean Cleanup; medal by Sunish from Noun Project (CC BY 3.0)
The Ocean Cleanup is a non-profit organization with a mission to eliminate plastic from the world's oceans, both by extracting plastic from the oceans and by intercepting trash from rivers that flow into the oceans. Their goal is to remove 90% of ocean plastic by the year 2040.
"Our aim is to put ourselves out of business once the oceans are clean."
Last week, The Ocean Cleanup completed their largest extraction ever: 11,353 kg (25,000+ lbs) of plastic were removed from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and you can watch the video to see the haul. (For comparison, in 2022 they removed 153,000 kg/337,307 lbs of plastic from the GPGP.)
Plastics in our oceans disrupt ecosystems. The plastics break down into microplastics, becoming harder to capture and more easily mistaken for food by marine life. If the fish we eat eat plastic, we in turn eat plastic.
So what happens to the collected plastic? The organization analyzes and sorts the plastic and works with partners across the globe to determine ways to recycle it into high-quality, durable consumer products. And yes, it's complicated.
The inception story is so intriguing: At the age of 16, founder and young inventor Boyan Slat was scuba diving in Greece and was discouraged that he saw more plastic bags than fish. He then started researching plastic pollution for a school project, which led to a TEDx talk that went viral in 2012, which led to Slat founding The Ocean Cleanup in 2013 at the age of 18. What a hero!
Feeling inspired?
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