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| Ocean Cleanup's System 001 is towed out of the San Francisco Bay in San Francisco, California (AFP Photo/JOSH EDELSON) |
San
Francisco (AFP) - A supply ship towing a long floating boom designed to corral
ocean plastic has set sail from San Francisco for a test run ahead of a trip to
the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
The
ambitious project by The Ocean Cleanup, a Dutch non-profit group, hopes to
clean up half of the infamous garbage patch within five years when all systems
are deployed.
After five
years of preparation and scale model tests, "this is what it's all about,
this is the culmination of all the efforts," said an excited Boyan Slat,
the 24-year-old Dutch CEO and founder of The Ocean Cleanup.
Under a
cloudless sky the Maersk Launcher ship sailed on Saturday past the Golden Gate
Bridge out into the Pacific sea accompanied by a flotilla of sailboats and
kayaks.
The supply
vessel was towing a 600 meter-long boom device dubbed System 001, designed to
contain floating ocean plastic so it can be scooped up and recycled. The system
includes a tapered three-meter skirt to catch plastic floating just below the
surface.
The ship
was heading to a spot 240 nautical miles off the California coastline for a
two-week trial before sailing to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a floating
trash pile twice the size of France that swirls in the ocean halfway between
California and Hawaii.
"The
main mission is to show that it works, and hopefully then in a few months from
now, the first plastics will arrive back into port, which means that it becomes
proven technology," Slat told AFP as he witnessed the launch.
"That
means that we can then start scaling up to a whole fleet of maybe 60 of these
cleanup systems," he said.
Laurent
Lebreton, the project's lead oceanographer, said they believe the Pacific
garbage patch contains some 80,000 metric tons of plastic waste.
"Plastic
has started to accumulate in the ocean since... the 1950s," Lebreton told
AFP.
He said
that scientists first learned about the plastic concentrating in the Pacific
garbage patch in the 1970s.
Land-based
plastic comes mainly from rivers, Lebreton said. "But we also find a lot
of fishing ropes, fishing nets," he said.
.
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An impression of how the system might look. Photo: Ocean Cleanup
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