The Plastic Pollution trash collection device which was set to float between Los Angeles and Hawaii to collect the trash in the Pacific Ocean has broken and is being transferred back to dry land for the necessary repairs, NBC News reported.
Dutch Inventor, Boyan Slat who is behind the groundbreaking creation told NBC News last week that the trash collection device is 2,000 foot long and it is to be towed the long path of 800 miles to Hawaii over the Pacific Ocean.
In case the damage is too large for the device to be repaired at the closest dry land, it will have to get loaded onto a barge and transported to its home where it was created in Alameda, California. The reason the trash collection device broke was because of the strong tidal waves and constant wind that has been blowing. Slat didn’t hide his disappointment in an interview with NBC News, but said that the work will continue once the device is repaired.
“Of course there is slight disappointment, because we hoped to stay out there a bit longer to do more experiments and to….solve the [plastic] retention issue,” Slat said. “But there is no talk whatsoever about discouragement.”
“This is an entirely new category of machine that is out there in extremely challenging conditions,” the 24-year-old Dutch inventor said. “We always took into account that we might have to take it back and forth a few times. So it’s really not a significant departure from the original plan.”
Slat has also said that the device was moving slower compared to the plastic it was suppose to collect in the Pacific Ocean, which allowed the trash to escape. A critic who has been following the project of the young inventor since it was first patented more than five years ago, said per the report that the chance of failure was predictable, and that the systems which work closer to shore have greater chances of success since it is easier to repair, and in that way functioning properly, reducing the plethora of plastics in the world’s oceans.
“I certainly hope they will be able to get it to work, but this is a very difficult environment where equipment breaks, which is why you normally do things closer to shore, where things are easier to repair,” Miriam Goldstein, director of ocean policy at the Center for American Progress said as reported.
According to Slat, he hopes that the trash collection device will be able to reduce plastic pollution and hopes to deploy 60 of the devices which would clean up the plastic waste off the oceans’ surfaces.
