The WasteShark by RanMarine is designed to remove floating pollution such as plastics, algae and biomass from lakes, ponds, waterways and harbours.
Millions of tonnes of plastic wind up in the ocean every year, killing plants and animals. That’s why companies around the world have developed novel devices to help reduce the ocean plastic problem.
Dutch company RanMarine has deployed several 157-centimetre wide aquatic drones called WasteSharks that capture rubbish and bring it back to land.
The drones can hold 160 litres of trash, floating plants and algae, according to RanMarine Technology.
The aquatic tech is inspired by the whale shark, which swims with its mouth wide open to capture prey.
“So, that’s why we have two pontoons, one on each side, so that the waste can come in from the front and it gets trapped in between the pontoons,” explains design engineer Tessa Despinic.
It’s crucial to scoop up the plastic before it reaches the large ocean expanse, says Nancy Wallace, director of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Marine Debris Program.
“Once plastic or trash ends up in the ocean, it’s very hard to collect because it does break down. And so it gets smaller and smaller and it’s just hard to get out to our big open oceans and collect the trash there.
“We’d much rather collect that trash closer to shore, which is easier, it’s less costly,” she says.
What other trash devices have been developed around the world?
In India, AlphaMERS Ltd has developed an inexpensive way of capturing plastic waste. It has installed steel mesh fences extending above and below aluminum floats across rivers in eight Indian cities.
The system is also easy to maintain as each mesh fence is angled to guide trash to a riverbank excavators pile it into dump trucks.
In Chennai, eight traps in the Cooum River scooped up 2,200 tonnes of plastic and 19,800 tonnes of other trash and floating plants in 2018, according to the company.
Then there’s the Osprey Initiative of Mobile, Alabama in the US. The company sets up floating traps on creeks, canals and rivers in the southeast of the country and trains local crews to deal with the waste they catch.
These plastic-gobbling devices are an attempt to curb an estimated 8 million tonnes of plastic that enter the ocean every year.
“The most important thing with marine debris or plastic or trash in our ocean is we don’t want it there in the first place,” Wallace from the NOAA says.
“So while all of these devices are incredibly helpful, we really need to work on the upstream solutions of generating less waste from the consumer standpoint, but also the industry standpoint.”
Overall, Wallace adds, there are a lot of different players involved in solving the plastic waste problem.
The Invisible Wave
Marine Chemical Pollution: The Invisible Wave
Chemical pollution – of land, air, rivers, watersheds – has been a festering issue for decades, occasionally prompting resolute action. But only recently has the scale of chemical pollution become more apparent. Invisible Wave, part of the Back to Blue initiative between Economist Impact and The Nippon Foundation, brings the issue of marine chemical pollution to a wider audience that includes policymakers, governments, the chemicals industry itself, the broader business community, the finance sector, civil society and consumers.
Immersive data story on the science of chemical pollution
Chemicals are an essential part of our everyday life but without environmentally friendly methods or production, recycling and disposal, they pose a real and growing threat to our planet. Our immersive data story guides readers through the latest science and evidence on the interactions between chemicals with marine environments – and the steps needed to tackle the problem before it is too late.
THE INVISIBLE WAVE: GETTING TO ZERO CHEMICAL POLLUTION
The objective of The Invisible Wave is to raise the status of chemical pollution as a real priority for ocean health. The report, video, and other items below are only the beginning of the conversation. Ultimately, our aim is to have transformational impact on knowledge and awareness of marine chemical pollution.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Plastic is a critical problem for the ocean. But it is not the only problem. The Invisible Wave, published in March 2022, sets out a case for chemical pollution in the ocean to be treated with the same gravity and the same urgency as plastic pollution. In many ways, they are two sides of the same coin.
FULL REPORT: THE INVISIBLE WAVE
Based on a wide-ranging expert interview program and deep analysis of the scientific research, the white paper explains the past, present and possible futures of marine chemical pollution, focusing on all societal stakeholders – chemicals companies, industries reliant on chemicals, policy makers and consumers.
To read this interesting article, please click on this link
WWF: Plastic in oceans quadrupled by 2050, major consequences for nature
By 2050, plastic waste in the oceans will have quadrupled, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) writes in a new report on Tuesday. Vulnerable nature such as coral reefs and mangrove forests will be particularly affected by this.
According to the WWF, plastic production is expected to double by 2040 compared to today. Some of that plastic eventually ends up in the oceans. This will have major consequences for animals and ecosystems.
More than 2,000 animal species are already experiencing the effects of plastic in their living environment, according to the report. An estimated 90 percent of seabirds and 52 percent of sea turtles have already ingested plastic, the WWF writes. This may involve microplastics in the stomach, plastic waste around the neck and plasticizers in the blood.
The conservation organization warns that the threshold values for microplastic concentrations will be exceeded by the end of this century. This is already the case in the Mediterranean Sea, the East China Sea, the Yellow Sea and the Arctic Ocean.
“All studies show that plastic waste in the oceans is an irreversible process. If we don’t act quickly, the consequences of plastic pollution will be incalculable,” says Oskar de Roos, plastics expert at WWF.
Hundreds of major companies and civil society organizations have now joined a WWF petition for a global UN convention against plastic pollution.
Our planet is drowning in plastic pollution it’s time for change!
While plastic has many valuable uses, we have become addicted to single-use or disposable plastic — with severe environmental consequences.
Around the world, one million plastic drinking bottles are purchased every minute, while 5 trillion single-use plastic bags are used worldwide every year. In total, half of all plastic produced is designed to be used only once — and then thrown away. Plastic waste is now so ubiquitous in the natural environment that scientists have even suggested it could serve as a geological indicator of the Anthropocene era.
Plastics including microplastics are now ubiquitous in our natural environment. They are becoming part of the Earth’s fossil record and a marker of the Anthropocene, our current geological era. They have even given their name to a new marine microbial habitat called the “plastisphere”.
So how did we get here?
From the 1950s to the 1970s, only a small amount of plastic was produced, and as a result, plastic waste was relatively manageable.
However between the 1970s and the 1990s, plastic waste generation more than tripled, reflecting a similar rise in plastic production.
In the early 2000s, the amount of plastic waste we generated rose more in a single decade than it had in the previous 40 years.
Today, we produce about 400 million tonnes of plastic waste every year.
We are seeing other worrying trends. Since the 1970s, the rate of plastic production has grown faster than that of any other material. If historic growth trends continue, global production of primary plastic is forecasted to reach 1,100 million tonnes by 2050. We have also seen a worrying shift towards single-use plastic products, items that are meant to be thrown away after a single short use.
Approximately 36 per cent of all plastics produced are used in packaging, including single-use plastic products for food and beverage containers, approximately 85 per cent of which ends up in landfills or as unregulated waste.
Additionally, some 98 per cent of single-use plastic products are produced from fossil fuel, or “virgin” feedstock. The level of greenhouse gas emissions associated with the production, use and disposal of conventional fossil fuel-based plastics is forecast to grow to 19 per cent of the global carbon budget by 2040.
Meet Mr Trash Wheel – and the other new devices that eat river plastic
Mr Trash Wheel scooping up debris in Baltimore harbour. More than 17 tonnes have been collected in a day. Photograph: Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images
From ‘bubble barriers’ to floating drones, a host of new projects aim to stop plastic pollution before it ever reaches the ocean
The technology, created by a Dutch firm and already being used in Amsterdam, is being trialled in the Douro River in Porto, Portugal, as part of the EU-supported Maelstrom (marine litter sustainable removal and management) project.
It is the latest in a series of new technologies designed to find sustainable ways to remove and treat river debris before it reaches the sea.
Plastic can be spread by natural disasters, such as a tsunami, which can push invasive species and debris halfway across the world. But rivers carry a much more regular supply of plastic to the oceans. Research in 2017 found that 10 river systems transport 90% of all the plastic that ends up in the world’s oceans (two in Africa – the Nile and Niger – with the other eight in Asia: the Ganges, Indus, Yellow, Yangtze, Haihe, Pearl, Mekong and Amur).
A man paddles along the Citarum River in West Java, Indonesia, one of the word’s most polluted rivers. In 2018, it was estimated that 20,000 tonnes of rubbish and 350,000 tonnes of wastewater were dumped in it every day. Photograph: Andrea Carrubba/The Guardian
Molly Morse, a scientist at UC Santa Barbara’s Benioff Ocean Initiative and lead on its global Clean Currents Coalition, says: “In some cases, communities don’t have access to proper waste pickup services and must turn to what might seem to be the only alternative: dump the trash directly in the river to be carried away.
“In other cases, plastic litter on land is moved by rain or wind into a river, where […] the plastic may make its way to the ocean.”
An estimated 0.8m to 2.7m tonnes of plastic are carried by rivers to the ocean each year. That is the equivalent of 66,000 to 225,000 doubledecker buses.
“The most successful solutions have been simpler technologies, such as booms, barriers and traps”
Without barriers, river currents carry plastic directly to the sea, where it becomes far trickier to tackle: plastic often floats for vast distances, can host invasive species and becomes part of the wider plastisphere, such as the concentration of seaborne waste in the Great Pacific garbage patch.
That is why some scientists are calling for greater efforts to stop plastic going into rivers in the first place. A 2020 study found that a “significant reduction” of plastic in the ocean could be achieved only by stopping it reaching the sea, or through a combination of river barriers and other clean-up devices.
Cue inventors, who have developed an array of river barriers and collection devices to catch and remove riverine plastic – from simple nets and booms to conveyor belts and robots.
Mr Trash Wheel, known officially as the Inner Harbor Water Wheel, is a conveyor-belt system powered by currents and solar energy, launched in 2014 in the US city of Baltimore. Long booms with submerged skirts funnel waste into a central hub, where autonomous rakes scoop it on to a conveyor belt that deposits it on a barge, with more than 17 tonnes collected in a day.
Once full, the barge takes the rubbish to be incinerated in a power plant, though it is hoped that eventually the collected waste can be sorted and recycled. There is now a whole family of Trash Wheels in Baltimore, the latest addition being Gwynnda, the Good Wheel of the West.
Or there’s the Interceptor, a floating, solar-powered device developed by the non-profit organisation The Ocean Cleanup, billed as the “world’s first scalable solution” to rid the oceans of plastic. Similar but larger than the trash wheel, it has barriers that guide rubbish on to a conveyor belt, where a shuttle distributes it among five onboard waste bins.
Another design, the Azure barrier, developed by the UK-based startup Ichthion to operate in any river, can remove up to 80 tonnes of plastic a day using durable, tide-sensitive booms that direct plastic to extraction points along the bank. The plastic is processed into flakes for recycling.
Other more hi-tech inventions include the WasteShark, an electronically controlled “aquadrone” that preys on plastic – up to 350kg at a time. Using algorithms from the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, the WasteShark moves around and back to its docking station autonomously, where up to five of the catamaran-shaped vessels can deposit the collected plastic and recharge. The design, developed by a Dutch startup, RanMarine, is due to be showcased at CES 2022 in Las Vegas this month.
The WasteShark aquadrone uses algorithms to move around and back to its docking station autonomously, where it deposits the collected plastic and recharges. Photograph: Handout
While the cost of implementing these technologies may be feasible for some cities and towns – and vastly preferable to the cost of plastic pollution, which it is estimated will reach $7.1tn (£5.25tn) by 2040 – there are many other factors to consider. These include, says Morse, “the physical river characteristics, amount of waste, seasonal changes, ecology, power sources, workforce availability, security, boat traffic [and] funding”.
Philip Ehrhorn, co-founder of the Great Bubble Barrier, says: “One of the biggest challenges we face is the lack of regulation regarding plastic pollution in our waterways and thereof the lack of ownership and responsibility for the problem.
“The urgency to solve our plastic pollution problem in rivers is down to forward-thinking water authorities and governments, since plastic is not yet officially considered a water pollutant,” he says.
Plastic and other waste clogging Bangkok’s Ladprao canal. Up to 10 tonnes of rubbish are collected from the city’s canals everyday. Photograph: Narong Sangnak/EPA
There is no one-size-fits-all solution, says Morse. “Rivers vary immensely in respect to factors such as depth, width, flow and seasonality. What might work in a massive river like the Mississippi in the United States, which flows all year round, likely will not work for a smaller, more seasonal river like the Tijuana in Mexico.”
In Ecuador, Ichthion’s Azure prototype had problems on the Portoviejo River. Data had suggested the river’s depth varied in the wet and dry seasons by two metres; in reality, it fluctuated by as much as four metres within a few days.
Getting support from the local people and permission for new infrastructure can also be difficult. For the Clean Currents Coalition, which is working with eight teams around the world, simplicity works best.
“The most successful solutions have been the simpler technologies – such as booms, barriers and traps – that are manufactured locally and require manual removal of the captured waste,” Morse says. This can also create extra jobs.
One example of these is Wildcoast’s “brute boom” at the Los Laureles Canyon, a tributary of the Tijuana River. The double-walled float stretches across the river and allows the boom to move with the changing depth. A suspended steel mesh catches the plastic, which is taken for processing once the boom is full. Reports from San Diego in California suggest that it has succeeded in reducing plastic downstream.
The Interceptor scoops waste from the Klang River near the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur. The device, developed by the Ocean Cleanup, is solar-powered. Photograph: Mohd Rasfan/AFP/Getty
TerraCycle’s river traps, which are installed in some of Bangkok’s 1,600 polluted canals, catch up to 2.5 tonnes of waste a day, helping to recycle plastic instead of sending it to landfill.
A German startup, Plastic Fischer, has installed TrashBooms in waterways in Indonesia, India and Vietnam. It advocates a local, low-tech and low-cost approach, using locally manufactured mesh-and-float barriers to catch rubbish.
Many environmentalists argue that these innovations treat the symptoms, not the problem, and that the only real solution is to curb plastic production. But, with plastic manufacturing shipments estimated to have risen by 2.2% last year by the Plastic Industry Association, this is not likely any time soon.
“If we’re going to keep producing, consuming and disposing of plastics at, or near, our current rate, our ability to manage it needs to catch up – and quickly,” says Morse.
Plastic Marine litter is one of the biggest threats to ocean life and humans. Now that there is more plastic in the water than fish, new solutions are desperately needed to radically reduce the harmful effects of microplastics. That’s why the Dutch start-up RanMarine Technology is showing the WasteShark USV (Unmanned Surface Vessel) at CES 2022, a floating drone designed to remove harmful plastic waste from waters and return it to shore before it can do damage.
Every year, 8 million tons of toxic plastic leak into our oceans. The UN Environmental Program predicts that this number will triple to about 35 million tons per year by 2040. RanMarine Technology, a startup of CleanTech Robotics, has come up with a solution to eradicate this pollution. The company invented multiple floating drones to clear waterways, canals, rivers and ports of plastic before it leaks into the ocean. In addition, the company is introducing a new docking station, with which the drones can independently remove plastic for 24 hours a day.
Water quality analysis
The WasteShark is designed to intelligently harvest plastic and biomass waste from urban waterways in smart cities, ports and ports. In addition to waste harvesting the drone also collects critical water quality data. The drone can be controlled directly by an operator or used in Autonomous mode. In this latter scenario, users can set the route and mission remotely via an online dashboard.
WasteShark’s features
With 180 liters (47.5 gallons) of capacity and an 8-hour runtime, this hardworking robot can remove 500kg (1100lb) of waste a day. The WasteShark is also easy to use and deploy. Using 4G onboard communications and an easy setup process, launching multiple drones has been made deliberately simple and easy for customers. Additionally, the drone uses advanced battery technology ensuring emission-free operation on the water, and not adding to the water’s pollution. This makes the WasteShark one of the solutions leading the way in the fight against plastic.
SharkPod Mothership
RanMarine will also introduce the SharkPod, the world’s first autonomous floating docking station for waste-clearing drones, at CES 2022. With the ability to deploy, dock and charge up to 5 WasteShark drones at any time, this latest tool in pollution-fighting technology will enable ports, harbors and cities to operate a 24-hour autonomous solution to remove floating waste from the water.
With the ability to remove 1 ton of waste per drone per day, RanMarine expects the SharkPod to be capable to remove up to 100 tons or more of debris and waste per month. With the prototype unit that will be deployed in 2022, among other places in the Port of Rotterdam, drones will be able to dock, discharge waste, recharge and redeploy on a continuous 24-hour basis: all from a centrally controlled online environment.
New approach to current problems
The brainchild of RanMarine founder and CEO Richard Hardiman: “We have an epic battle on our hands. Current technologies are simply not working, we need a modern approach to a modern problem, and for me robots and autonomous drones were an easy and simple answer. Of course it’s critical to create policies and strategies to stop plastic waste from entering our waterways as a primary strategy. Our WasteSharks offer a pragmatic solution for cleaning up the existing mess that is perpetuated on a daily basis, and effectively prevent waste from reaching the open ocean.”
“With the release of the SharkPod, we aim to see full time deployment of WasteSharks with zero emissions and greater and quicker capture of toxic plastics in our waterways”, says Hardiman. “With an ever-increasing plastic pollution challenge at hand, we need to reduce costs, increase capture rates and make these solutions ever more affordable and easier to deploy for every city and port globally.”
Existing customers
RanMarine’s robotic products are designed to remove plastic waste and biomass such as algae from waterways; their clients span over twelve territories and are made up of civic and commercial entities including the Port of Houston, Disney theme parks, the United Nations and local and state authorities worldwide.
Exclusive interview: H2O Global News’ Sion Geschwindt spoke with RanMarine CEO, Richard Hardiman, about water quality and how their autonomous drone – WasteShark – tackles polluted waterways
August is Water Quality Month – a time dedicated to the freshwater resources upon which we all depend. Maintaining and improving water quality is essential, but challenges such as pollution hamper these efforts.
Inland waterways like rivers and lakes are particularly susceptible. Chemicals, algal blooms, heavy metals, and bacteria are among the many threats to fresh water quality. Another is plastic.
While we tend to think of plastic pollution as a problem only affecting the world’s oceans, a lot of it originates and collects in freshwater systems before even reaching the sea.
Clearing up inland waters and harbours of plastic waste is crucial, but no easy task. To tackle the problem head on, Dutch start-up RanMarine have developed an autonomous water surface vehicle (ASV) – called WasteShark – which removes floating pollution such as plastics, algae and biomass from water bodies throughout the world.
The plastic problem
Plastics got us to the moon, facilitated huge advancements in medicine and transformed the manufacturing industry. The world as we know it today would be unrecognisable if it weren’t for this durable, versatile, and often indispensable, material.
The UN Environment Programme (UNEP) estimates that more than 8.3 billion tons of plastic has been produced since the early 1950s. Yet, about 60% of that plastic has ended up in either a landfill or the natural environment.
The characteristics that render plastics so useful, also make them an environmental nightmare. Most of us have witnessed the shocking images of marine life tangled in fishing nets or beached whales who have ingested too much plastic waste. But the impacts go beyond the obvious.
River are the greatest source of plastic pollution to the ocean
Plastics break down into finer and finer particles – known as microplastics – which are often undetectable to the human eye. Microplastics can kill aquatic life and leach harmful chemicals into surrounding water bodies. These particles have been found at the top of Mount Everest and the bottom of the Mariana Trench – the deepest point in the ocean.
According to a study published last year, rivers are the dominant source of plastic pollution in the marine environment. Cleaning up waste before it enters the ocean is crucial.
If you have ever participated in a beach or river clean-up you will know that collecting waste manually is no easy feat. However, technology aimed at simplifying the task of removing water surface pollution has been scarce to date – precisely why RanMarine designed WasteShark.
WasteShark
WasteShark is an easy to operate, carbon neutral, robotic, waste-eating-machine. The drone can collect 500kg of plastic waste and biomass every day, while gathering water quality data in the process.
“We aim to improve water quality on two levels,” said RanMarine CEO, Richard Hardiman. “Firstly, by removing plastic, waste, and excess algae from the water surface, and secondly by gathering data on water quality changes and possible sources of pollution.”
RanMarine CEO, Richard Hardiman, stands next to a WasteShark drone
“Water pollution is fast becoming an everyday issue for both governments and citizens” – Richard Hardiman
RanMarine aim to empower people and organizations across the planet to restore aquatic environments. Their data-driven autonomous technology empowers cities, municipalities, ports, marinas, waste managers, scientists and action groups, to clean-up and monitor their waters.
“Water pollution is fast becoming an everyday issue for both governments and citizens,” said Hardiman. “Using robots to continuously remove trash means we won’t see ugly build-ups of trash on the water, lose plastic to the oceans and see further damage to the environment.”
Accurate data regarding water quality is essential for water managers to make informed decisions. WasteShark has the ability to run the same route multiple times over successive days, tracking the movement, dispersion and potential improvement of the water over time using the same GPS coordinates. It can test for water quality parameters such as temperature, pH, conductivity, depth, turbidity, fluorometers, nitrates and other chemicals.
“We need to understand what is in our water, where that pollutant is coming from and be able to create predictions about when anomalies may occur or track down the offending polluter. The more accessible that data is, the better,” said Hardiman.
Smart cities
Let’s face it, no one wants to spend all day every day cleaning up trash from waterways – but it’s a task that must be done. That is why automated, robotic solutions like WasteShark make so much sense – they do the dirty work, so we don’t have to.
To make the process even easier, RanMarine is currently working on a docking station that allows the drones to dock autonomously, remove their waste and recharge before going out on another mission, with very little human intervention.
WasteSharks can be found operating across the world, from Singapore, to Sydney and Cape Town. They are helping many places throughout the world embark on their smart city journey.
Smart cities understand that designing better urban areas requires adopting digital technology that improves the well-being of its citizens and equips decision-makers with actionable data.
With 70% of the world’s population predicted to live in cities by 2050, deploying smart technologies like WasteShark can make urban areas more liveable, safe and sustainable. Is it going to solve the entire plastic crisis? Definitely not, but it’s a start.
THE SAVIOR OF MARINE LIFE, WASTESHARK COMBATS POLLUTION PROBLEM IN WATER BODIES
A clean environment, including fresh air, land and waterways is necessary for all the living things on this planet.
Industrialization is vital for all the countries, as it not only boosts the economy and development, but also generates employment opportunities. At the same time, sustainable living is equally important. A clean environment, including fresh air, land and waterways is necessary for all the living things on this planet.
However, in spite of all the factual data readily available to study the devastating impact of pollution and environmental degradation, our effort to mitigate the impact remains questionable.
Especially, when it comes to the oceans and other water bodies, the recent developments have been worrying to say the least. A number of plastic patches are floating on the surface of oceans, with some of them easily visible through satellite imagery.
The chemical waste released by several industries is only making the things complex. With increasing pollution levels, the marine life is threatened, while the humans are also being affected both directly and indirectly.
Although a number of innovative solutions have been tried and tested by the concerned authorities across the world so far, the success rate has not exuberated confidence. However, in the last few years, a unique product called WasteShark has turned heads with its efficiency and success rate.
Developed by Netherland-based RanMarine Technology, this water-robot is world’s first data harvesting autonomous surface vessel. It is designed to remove the unwanted material from the water bodies, while being operated autonomously or remotely.
WasteShark is capable of cleaning up 500 kg of debris per day, other than being a solution to monitor the pollution levels. The cost of fueling this water-robot for a year is equal to the cost of watching TV for 5 hours in a day for 12 months.
It comes with a battery capacity of 8 hours that is enough to accomplish the task for the day. WasteShark goes about its business without harming the marine life.
Having already been deployed in several water bodies across various countries, WasteShark has succeeded in withstanding the test of cleaning up lakes, ponds and oceans without any disruption. On the back of such innovative solutions, RanMarine Technology has come a long way.
The company was even able to attract global investment firm Boundary Holding, led by Rajat Khare. It also received funding from European Union (EU) to scale up operations and reduce the pollution considerably with its effective product list.
Reversing technological advancements or industrialization is not an option anymore. Having come this far, it would be stupid to believe that the plastic and chemical waste generation can be completely stopped anytime soon.
At this juncture, the better option is to control the damage by constantly cleaning up water bodies with innovative solutions like WasteShark and being more responsible towards the handling of environment in the larger picture.
Read full article by Influencive
New floating drones could help fight plastic pollution
Floating drones inspired by whale sharks and four-wheeled robots are the latest inventions in an attempt to address plastic pollution, Bloomberg reports.
RanMarine Technology, an organization based in Rotterdam, has developed what they call a ‘WasteShark’ that collects waste through a wide opening that mimics a whale shark. The WasteShark is an autonomous surface vessel, this means that it requires no supervision as it can be left in the chosen water body, with a preset route, using GPS to navigate and then return home.
The organisation claims that the WasteShark can collect up to 500kg of waste per day. There is also a four-wheeled version, a beachbot, that collects small litter like cigarette butts and bottle caps. You can view the WasteShark in action on the canals of Holland below.
A recent publication in Nature Sustainabilityprovided a comprehensive analysis of the solutions to tackle marine litter. Even though policies are being created to address plastic pollution, such as the decision taken by Tanzania in 2019 to ban all plastic bags in the country, the publication brings up the issue of the existing plastic in our oceans.
The research was led by biologist Nikoleta Bellou who commented that “the oceans have already been polluted to such an extent, simultaneous to all the actions needed to reduce pollution at the source”.
Plastics pollution is piling up faster than initiatives to correct it, with calculations indicating that it will take about 100 years to retrieve 5% of plastic in the oceans
As much as 91 million tons have entered the world’s oceans between 1980 and 2015, with more than 8 million tons entering the oceans every year. What we see on the surface is only 5% of the plastic in the oceans. plastic has contaminated the darkest parts of the Mariana trench and is so widespread that it is estimated that by 2050, 99% of seabirds would have ingested plastic.
The worsening plastic pollution on the planet seems as if our reality is coming to represent Pixar’s 2008 film, Wall-E, where the earth so despoiled that it is no longer inhabitable that humans are living in some kind of space-ark while a robot is left to clean up the waste. But this is just a movie…
To prevent this dystopia, policies to avoid disincentive plastic production and encourage a circular economy as well as public education on the harms of plastic are needed in collaboration with technofixes such as the WasteShark. In 2010, South Africa ranked 11th on the list of the worst offenders regarding plastic pollution in the ocean. South Africa only recycles 16% of its plastic, where the rest end up in landfills where they can easily blow into rivers and eventually, the ocean.
Solutions to remove garbage from the sea have boomed in past years, but a lot more is needed to end plastic pollution
The garbage-collecting BeachBot rover during a demonstration at a beach in the Netherlands. Source: TechTics/Project.BB
Floating drones inspired by whale sharks and four-wheeled robots that resemble the Mars rover are among the latest inventions designed to remove litter from the oceans.
The number of tools to monitor, prevent and clean up ocean pollution has grown almost exponentially over the past four years, according to a paper published in Nature Sustainability. The research, led by biologist Nikoleta Bellou at the Institute of Coastal Research Helmholtz-Zentrum Hereon, is the most comprehensive analysis of sea-cleaning solutions to date.
“Unfortunately more focus at a policy level is being given to banning single-use plastics,” Bellou said. “But we already have polluted the oceans and we need to do something to retrieve that, simultaneously to all the actions needed to reduce pollution at the source.”
Chemicals, fossil fuels and plastics are present in all of the world’s oceans and have been found both at the surface and at the bottom of the seas. Marine litter threatens the survival of wildlife such as seabirds, whales, fishes and turtles because they can get tangled in it or confuse it with food. Tiny pieces of plastic known as microplastics can make their way up the food chain, eventually ending up in human bodies.
MAPP bot has been designed to detect small pieces of garbage in beaches. Source: TechTics/Project.BB
As many as 91 million metric tons of litter entered the oceans between 1990 and 2015, as much as 87% of which was plastic, according to the research. An estimated 5.25 trillion particles of litter are currently floating in the oceans.
While the impacts of polluting the seas were reasonably understood by the end of the 1980s, it wasn’t until 2016 that solutions to address the problem really took off. Of the 177 methods analyzed by Bellou and her colleagues, 73% were only developed in the past four years. Most approaches so far address monitoring, with only 30 aimed at clean up, the research found. Most focus on large litter floating on the surface, meaning microplastics at the bottom of the sea remain an unresolved issue.
Funding soared in 2014 after the European Union launched research programs such as the nearly 80 billion-euro ($97 billion) Horizon2020 initiative. About half of the ocean projects available today were government-funded, while a third were paid for through collaborations between nonprofit organizations, the public and companies, according to the paper.
The new research, which doesn’t reveal which specific projects Bellou and her team analyzed, points to a wide range of inventions—and the challenges of scaling them up.
RanMarine’s WasteShark collects litter floating on the surface of rivers and canals.
There’s also BeachBot, a garbage-collecting rover that picks up small litter like cigarette butts, single-use cutlery or plastic bottle caps from beaches. Creators Martijn Lukaart and Edwin Bos sought the help of students at University of Technology Delft in the Netherlands to develop an algorithm which teaches the robot to distinguish between types of trash.
“It’s nice to develop a robot solution, but that’s not the solution to the wider problem,” Bos said. “Behavior needs to change and our goal is to make people interact and engage with the robot to make it smarter, but also to learn about the impact of litter themselves.”
A BeachBot prototype has been deployed in several locations in the Netherlands and the two entrepreneurs say they’re ready to move toward launching the product. The next challenge is to find the right business model to ensure BeachBot doesn’t just clean, but also educates the public and changes behaviors.
Despite recent efforts, a lot more will be needed to make a dent in ocean plastic pollution, Bellou’s paper concluded. Plastic production and waste accumulates faster than the inventions to reduce it. By some calculations, it would take about a century to remove 5% of plastics currently in the oceans using only clean-up devices.
RanMarine’s WasteShark collects litter floating on the surface of rivers and canals.