The Ocean Cleanup brought the results of its first mission in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch into the Port of Vancouver last week. The mission was to develop and prove the capability of a passive cleanup system that can move with the currents and tolerate significant wave heights. The system proved its ability to gather plastic debris in massive ghost nets down to microplastics one millimeter in size. The sixty cubic-metre bags filled with plastic trash ranging from toothbrushes to fishing nets recovered and landed in Vancouver will be transformed into sustainable products that will be sold to help fund the continuation of the cleanup operations. Dutch inventor Boyan Slat, who founded the Ocean Cleanup at the age of 18, is already working on the next system which will be full scale and fully operational with long term durability and retention capability.
