This Dutch engineer explains how to clean up the ocean fromplastic

Each year, 8 million tons of plastic — the equivalent of a garbage truck load every minute — is dumped in the ocean, according to the World Economic Forum.

The Ocean Cleanup, a nonprofit environmental engineering organization based in the Netherlands, is attempting to remove as much plastic as possible.

Our strategy is really twofold, the Ocean Cleanup CEO and Founder Boyan Slat said on Yahoo Finance Live video stream above In one hand, stop the source, preventing more plastic from entering the oceans and rivers. But at the same time, there is a lot of legacy plastic in the ocean, especially this Great Pacific Garbage Patch between Hawaii and California. It's massive and is a powerful force, but doesn't go away by itself. So we have to clean this up. The Ocean Cleanup has deployed three interceptors in rivers in Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Dominican Republic to prevent plastic from entering oceans. Solar-powered barrier and conveyor system uses river currents to funnel plastic into containers that can be brought back to land and sorted through.

The ultimate goal is to develop the first scalable technology to remove plastic from Earth's water, Slat said.

Ocean Cleanup is targeting garbage patches, areas where circulating ocean currents amass plastic in large concentrations.

Because most plastics don't break down for hundreds of years, the debris accumulates over time.

The largest garbage patch, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, is estimated to contain 79,000 tons of plastic across an area of more than half a million square miles. The detritus is primarily composed of microplastics, described by the National Ocean Service as small pieces less than five millimeters long which can be harmful to our ocean and aquatic life. Ocean Cleanup's approach draws inspiration from the natural world and coastlines in particular.

How do you catch plastic if you look at coastlines? Getting all of this at once gave Slat and his crew to building coastlines in the middle of the ocean.

Basically, we've created very floating barriers that we drag along the patch, he said. And it concentrates before we can take out the plastic. In 2019, Ocean Cleanup recalled its first system, named 'Wilson', to fix and iterate on its design. Since then, the nonprofit has continued to make adjustments and even launched its latest prototype system 002 or Jenny in July 2021.

If everything goes wrong now, we are sure to see a system completely filled with plastic, Slat said. And if that works, we can say with confidence that the technology works and we can scale this up. The nonprofit is also looking for ways to clean up how its ocean vessels are powered. Slat stated the difficulty in cleaning plastic in the oceans without fossil fuels.

Batteries are just not good enough for that yet, he said. We do use biofuels and at the same time, we're experimenting with low carbon biofuels. And all rest of the emissions will be offset, so clean up will remain carbon neutral. Since it was founded in 2013 Ocean Cleanup boasts a number of notable backers, including Slat and a recent partnership with Coca-Cola KO Regarding the partnership with Maersk MAERSK which was rated as the world's top plastic polluter in 2020, Slat said there's two ways to look at it. One way, he said, is to look at it from a plastic lens, in which Coca-Cola appears to virtuously help the plastic problem while continuing to pollute waters with plastic bottles and other packaging.

But the way I look at it is that it's a pragmatic way to scale this up, Slat continued. Co-Cola says they don't want the ocean polluted with plastic. The society should be allowed to solve this problem by cleaning out their own waste - I believe if anyone should be paying for this clean up, it's companies like Coca-Cola.