Photo credit:The Ocean Cleanup
count the number of particles
of plastic that went through
a strip of a certain length for
a certain amount of time and
that way we were able to calculate the speed of cleanup.
That doesn’t mean that 42%
is the maximum efficiency
because if you make the array
of floating barriers twice as
long, you would collect about
70%. I believe that if you
have a 100km long barrier
deployed for 20 years the
clean up efficiency is 75%,
so the 42% is an arbitrary
number; this is the efficiency
you would get if you deploy
the array for 10 years with
100km sides.
be defined as below 5 mm in length
and people sometimes erroneously
refer to all ocean plastics as microplastics. Over 90% of the plastics
are larger than microplastics and
also removing larger plastics will
prevent the increase of microplastics tenfold because a fundamental problem is that large plastics
get eroded by the sun and waves
into smaller bits that get eaten by
fish and mammals and birds. We
can collect the plastics over 2mm
JK: The feasibility report said
that you are unable to remove
the smallest microplastics –
millimetre sized plastic debris.
Is that going to be a problem?
Boyan: I don’t think so. Of course
we would prefer to catch all plastics
but we also ha ve to be realistic;
we won’t collect every last kilo of
plastic. It’s just about removing as
much as possible. Microplastics can
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