Ocean-going boom comes up empty in sea of plastic

A floating device sent to corral a swirling island of rubbish between California and Hawaii has not swept up any plastic.

A floating device sent to corral a swirling island of rubbish between California and Hawaii has not swept up any plastic waste.

But the young innovator ­behind the project says a fix is in the works. Boyan Slat, 24, who launched the Pacific Ocean cleanup project, said the speed of the solar-powered barrier was not ­allowing it to hold on to the plastic it catches.

“Sometimes the system actually moves slightly slower than the plastic, which of course you don’t want because then you have a chance of losing the plastic again,” Mr Slat said.

A crew of engineers will reach the U-shaped boom today and will work for the next few weeks to widen its span so that it catches more wind and waves to help it go faster, he said.

A ship towed the 600m barrier in September from San Francisco to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch — an island of garbage twice the size of Texas. It has been in place since the end of October, Mr Slat said. The plastic barrier with a ­tapered 3m deep screen was intended to act like a coastline, trapping some of the 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic that scientists estimate are swirling in the patch while allowing marine life to swim beneath it.

Mr Slat said he was not ­deterred by the setback because engineers expected to make tweaks to the system.

“What we’re trying to do has never been done before. So of course we were expecting to still need to fix a few things before it becomes fully operational,” he said of the system created by Ocean Cleanup, an organisation he founded.

Fitted with solar-powered lights, cameras, sensors and satellite antennas, the device communicates its position at all times, allowing a support vessel to fish out the collected plastic every few months and transport it to land for recycling.

Mr Slat expected shipping containers filled with fishing nets, plastic bottles, laundry baskets and other plastic garbage scooped up by the system to be back on land within a year. “We’ve given ourselves a year after launch to get this thing working,” he said. Among those sceptical of the Ocean Cleanup is George Leonard, chief scientist of the Ocean Conservancy, an environmental advocacy group. Mr Leonard says that even if plastic rubbish can be taken out of the ocean, a lot more is pouring in each year.

He said a solution must include stopping plastic from reaching the ocean and educating people to stop using bags.

AP