Floating Trash Collector

The Ocean Cleanup’s nearly 2,000-foot boom will collect ocean plastics from the gigantic garbage gyre over the next year.

The campaign to rid the world’s oceans of plastic trash marks a turning point on Saturday as a giant, floating trash-collector steams out of San Francisco on a mission to clean up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

38 million pieces of plastic trash litter the beaches of Henderson Island, a remote, uninhabited island in the South Pacific Ocean. Scientists who surveyed the area believe the island is covered in more plastic trash than anywhere else on the globe.

Over the course of the next year, the device will undergo the ultimate tests.

The project is the creation of Boyan Slat, a 24-year-old Dutch college dropout who raised more than $30 million on a five-year quest to build an ocean-cleaning machine.

More fundamentally, some say the project diverts attention away from what is regarded as a more cost-effective, consequential way to save the oceans—by preventing plastic trash from flowing into it in the first place.

Reference: National Geographic.com