PLASTIC OCEANS POLLUTION GYRES GARBAGE PATCHES WASTE

INTERNATIONAL WASTE MANAGEMENT - This is a superb illustration of the North and South Pacific garbage patches, compared to the North and South Atlantic gyres. The North Pacific gyre is just one of several swirling trash zones (gyres) in our oceans, and it's where a lot of our plastic litter ends up. While these debris patches aren't visible piles of floating trash in the water, they are inverted mountains - a bit like landfill sites at sea - hidden from view. The reality of what they are and how they got there is mind boggling and extremely harmful to marine life. We can't (at the moment) do much about nuclear waste in the oceans (except appeal to reason), but we can act to vacuum up solids before they end up on the ocean floor as a toxic carpet.

We are in a lot of trouble, and very few people in government appear to be serious about trying to put things right. The United Nations has been warning about the problem for many years now. So what is the problem apart from getting finance to the concerns that matter? In a study published in June of 2016 by Eunomia's, Dr Chris Sherrington, the conclusion is that "94% of the plastic that enters the ocean ends up on the sea floor. There is now on average an estimated 70kg of plastic in each square kilometre of sea bed."

The problem is that up until now there has been no culprit to hang to a mast, where it is all of us cumulatively - and some more than others. The other problem is that being in international waters no country feels responsible enough to want to take a stand on plastic pollution. Is it then up to individuals who feel strongly enough about poisoning the oceans, to want to clean them up? It could be, but the technology exists to identify the culprits - and if they do not voluntarily take action to clean their doorsteps, then worst offenders might be prosecuted.

CIRCULAR ECONOMY - [LEFT] Klaus Martin Schwab (born March 30, 1938) is an engineer and economist best known as the founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum (WEF). His wife and former secretary, Hilde, co-founded the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship. He was born in Ravensburg, Germany. The WEF looks at problems but does not suggest solutions - merely pointing out when there is an issue. [RIGHT] Dame Ellen MacArthur hung up her ocean racing spurs to concentrate on sustainability for the human race. One of her Foundations is working with the World Economic Forum to help others explain to world leaders that there will soon be more plastic in the oceans than fish. The date set for that apocalypse is 2050. If, as they claim, the UN and US are worried about food security, now is surely the time to put some backing on the table. It all begins in the rivers that wash untreated sewage out to sea. Ellen MacArthur teamed up with Leonardo di Caprio to present a united front at the recent Davos event. See our vision for sustainable oceans here.

Fortunately, there are some extremely brave souls who care enough about marine life and planet earth, to have put their thinking caps on, and some of those magnificent thought leaders are featured below, with articles and links to their projects, by way of a review of progress to date. We hope you enjoy reading about the problem and potential solutions, maybe enough to want to contribute to help what amounts to volunteers (non profit making concerns) who are investigating ocean pollution countermeasures. Whatever you decide in terms of financial aid, please give these eco warriors a big hand and mention their hard work to your friends and colleagues, so that more people get to know about our dirty habits.

STUDY IN PLASTIC 2010 - It is fair to assume that some countries are unlikely to produce waste that would end up in the oceans in great quantities. The above world map shows us, at a glance, who is producing serious concentrations of waste. These are the culprits that international law enforcement agencies should target. A first stage of such operations would be to educate the governments responsible, with a recommendation that they in turn educate their manufacturers and then end users. If that has little effect, then prosecution with heavy fines is likely to bring up short, those who refuse to deal with their waste responsibly. Education is likely to reduce the time it would take for a fleet of SeaVax machines to clean up the oceans - to restore a circular ocean economy. Asia and the Americas are clearly the most polluting geographical regions.

There are 5 swirling ocean garbage patches called gyres. The largest gyre is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, located between Hawaii and California, held to be about the size of France at the moment.

In oceanography a gyre is any large system of rotating ocean currents, particularly those involved with large wind movements. Gyres are caused by the Coriolis Effect; planetary vorticity along with horizontal and vertical friction, which determine the circulation patterns from the wind curl (torque). The term gyre can be used to refer to any type of vortex in the air or the sea, even one that is man-made, but it is most commonly used in oceanography to refer to the major ocean systems.

Try it for your self, put some water in a basin with some plastic beads, or something else that floats. Stir the water round and round, and you will find an accumulation in the centre. This will not work as well as in the oceans, because of attraction to the sides. There are no sides in the ocean, save beaches.

Manta Trawls are used by Scientists to collect zooplankton samples and are being used to collect plastic samples. (For more information about the Manta Trawl: http://5gyres.org/global_research) It is possible to create a Modified Manta Trawl to retrieve smaller plastic bits in large quantity from the ocean and protect marine life by using a filter/screen at the entrance.

Ocean gyres circle large areas of stationary, calm water, into which debris drifts, and due to the region’s lack of movement, can accumulate for years. These regions are called garbage patches. The Indian Ocean, North Atlantic Ocean, and North Pacific Ocean all have significant garbage patches. The garbage patch in the North Pacific Ocean is sometimes called the Pacific trash vortex or the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. it is the largest of the big five plastic dumps.

Garbage patches are created slowly. Marine debris makes its way into the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, for instance, from currents flowing along the west coast of North America and the east coast of Asia. Some of the debris is also dumped from ocean vessels, illegally.

The circular motion of the gyre draws in the debris, mostly small particles of plastic. Eventually, the debris makes its way to the center of the gyre, where it becomes trapped and breaks down into a kind of plastic soup.

Oceanographers and ecologists are concerned about garbage patches. In particular, they are studying the degradation, or breaking down, of plastics. Unlike natural substances, such as wood or metal, plastic does not disintegrate into organic substances. It simply breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces of plastic. These tiny plastic particles are as small as the algae and plankton that form the basis of the entire ocean food chain. Shrimp, birds, and fish consume these micro-plastics, which often kill them. The plastic chemicals can also be absorbed by predators of these species. The concentration of these chemicals increases through each trophic level of the food chain, a process known as bio-magnification.

Garbage patches generally accumulate far from any country’s coastline, and it is nearly impossible to track the origin of marine debris. The tiny plastic particles that make up most of the patches are also very difficult and expensive to detect and remove. Few nations have accepted the responsibility of cleaning up the ocean’s garbage patches, because it is so costly. There are though a multitude of charitable enterprises all looking for a solution.

Not far off from reality, Kathleen Egan gives us her vision of a future where plastic in our oceans remains untreated. We will all be surfing in the stuff.

Toxic chemicals (including PCBs and DDTs) are adsorbed by the plastic, increasing the concentration a million times (Mato et al., 2001). After entering the food chain, these persistent organic pollutants bio-accumulate in the food chain (Tanaka et al., 2013). Health effects linked to these chemicals are: cancer, malformation and impaired reproductive ability (Takada, oceanhealthindex.org). All in all, it's a cocktail that we could do without.

Plastic comes from oil after chemical refining and oil comes from petroleum companies. The companies producing the most polymers and polyolefins, or plastic products derived from such oil derivates are:

COMPANY A - Z	EMPLOYEES	$ BILLIONS
-	-	-
ALPLA:	17,300	3.3
Аrkema SA:	-	-
BASF:	39,000	63.7
Borealis AG:	-	-
Borouge (Abu Dhabi Polymers Co Ltd):	6,500	7.2
Braskem SA:	-	-
ChevronPhillips Chemical:	5,000	13.4
CNPC:( China National Petroleum Corp):	1,470,190	326.0
Dow Chemicals:	14,000	49.0
DuPont:	-	-
Exxon Mobil:	75,600	290.0
ENI S.p.A. Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi:	33,000	61.6
Formosa Plastics Corporation:	2,800	5.0
INEOS (Ineos Group AG):	19,000	60.0
Lanxess:	16,700	7.9
LG Chem:	14,000	17.8
Lyondell Bassell:	13,000	33.0
Polyone Corp:	-	-
Reliance Industries Ltd:	-	-
Repsol SA:	-	-
Sasol Ltd	-	-
SABIC: (Saudi Arabia Basic Industries Corp)	40,000	35.4
Sinopec	249,000	314.4
Tosoh Corp:	-	-
Total SA:

They feed thousands more companies who in turn provide drinks bottles and other packaging to shops and supermarkets where you buy products and finally dispose of the single use plastic. This would not be a problem if there was an ocean safety net, but there is not as yet. Hence, we need to lobby politicians to make the money available for effective recycling on land and from the sea.

Wind and waves can mix buoyant ocean plastics throughout the water column, but most of their mass remains at the sea surface, according to research led by The University of Western Australia.

PhD candidate Julia Reisser and her international team published the study in the journal Biogeosciences, reporting the first ever high - resolution vertical profiles of plastic pollution in the so - called “ocean garbage patches”.

Most of the submerged plastics were very small – less than 1 mm across. Previous studies noticed that tiny plastics were missing from the oceans. Ms Reisser is quoted as saying: “We have shown that at least a fraction of this missing plastic is still adrift at sea, but at depths greater than the surface layer that is usually sampled by scientists.”

When the wind was stronger than 10 knots, more than half of the 0.5-1mm particles were underwater. But even when there was no wind, about 20 per cent of these little plastics were still below the surface.

By using a new measuring device called a Multi-level Trawl, the researchers were able to measure plastic concentrations in ten layers simultaneously, down to a depth of 5 meters.

While taking measurements in the North Atlantic Garbage Patch, the team demonstrated that the mass concentration of millimeter-sized plastics drops exponentially from the sea surface to deeper waters.

The pioneering survey was conducted aboard the SV Sea Dragon, owned by Pangaea Exploration. It was sponsored by The University of Western Australia and the Ocean Cleanup Foundation.

Founder of the Ocean Cleanup Foundation and co-author of the study, Boyan Slat is quoted as saying: "The results of the study are good news to those developing technologies to extract plastic from oceanic garbage patches. Almost all plastic was on or very close to the surface, meaning it’s within reachable distances for a cleanup operation.”

ABSTRACT - RESEARCH ARTICLE

The vertical distribution of buoyant plastics at sea: an observational study in the North Atlantic Gyre

"Millimetre-sized plastics are numerically abundant and widespread across the world's ocean surface. These buoyant macroscopic particles can be mixed within the upper water column by turbulent transport. Models indicate that the largest decrease in their concentration occurs within the first few metres of water, where
in situ observations are very scarce. In order to investigate the depth profile and physical properties of buoyant plastic debris, we used a new type of multi-level trawl at 12 sites within the North Atlantic subtropical gyre to sample from the air–seawater interface to a depth of 5 m, at 0.5 m intervals.

Our results show that plastic concentrations drop exponentially with water depth, and decay rates decrease with increasing Beaufort number. Furthermore, smaller pieces presented lower rise velocities and were more susceptible to vertical transport. This resulted in higher depth decays of plastic mass concentration (milligrams m−3) than numerical concentration (pieces m−3). Further multi-level sampling of plastics will improve our ability to predict at-sea plastic load, size distribution, drifting pattern, and impact on marine species and habitats."

AUTHORS

J. Reisser (1),*, B. Slat (2),*, K. Noble (3), K. du Plessis (4), M. Epp (1), M. Proietti5, J. de Sonneville (2), T. Becker (6), and C. Pattiaratchi (1)

1. School of Civil, Environmental and Mining Engineering and UWA Oceans Institute, University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia

5. Instituto de Oceanografia, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande, Rio Grande, Brazil

6. Centre for Microscopy, Characterisation and Analysis, University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia

*These authors contributed equally to this work.

Ms Reisser received an International Postgraduate Research Scholarship and a UWA Completion Scholarship.

Julia Reisser - UWA Oceans Institute - jureisser@gmail.com
(+31) 6 28 628 036
David Stacey - UWA Media and Public Relations Manager
(+61 8) 6488 3229 / (+61 4) 32 637 716

COMPUTER GLOBAL OCEAN CURRENT SIMULATION - Dr Katya Popova, an ocean modeller at the NOC held workshops at the Ocean Business event in April 2015. She showed how the latest advances in ocean circulation computer modelling are providing increased detail for environmental consultants – including how new sea routes could appear in the Arctic in the future and how plastic and oil ocean waste distribution might be predicted. This could be an invaluable tool for projects like the SeaVax ocean cleaning robots if allied to the proposed SeaNet fleet operations. At the time of writing SeaVax is a 'proof of concept' model, with the team now looking to design and build a full size prototype.

HOW FAR HAS IT SPREAD ? THE GUARDIAN DEC 2014 - ANTARCTICA, AKADEMIK SHOKALSYIY

According to an article in the Guardian newspaper, even in Antarctica, plastic rubbish is prevalent. The expedition that got stuck in the ice on Christmas Day in 2013 returned some warnings for us all.

Expedition Chris Turney is quoted as saying: “Once we got back home and made sure everyone was all right, we got on with working up the data and getting a whole load of papers ready for submission.” Like the rescue mission, this involved plenty of waiting. “It took nearly six months to get all the samples through quarantine.”

Simple observations told unhappy stories. Trawls of water reeled in hauls of plastic rubbish, now seemingly ubiquitous in the world’s oceans. On land, counts of Adélie penguins revealed the population had slumped near Mawson’s huts in Commonwealth Bay in East Antarctica. The birds are now commuting 40 miles to get food for their young. “Another 10 years there probably won’t be many left,” said Turney.

GRIST TO THE MILL - The Oceanic Plastic Recovery project is based on technology that is viable and proposed in a manner that should work. The suggestion is to use solar powered robot barges to truck plastic waste from the five ocean gyres to a land station for processing. We believe this to be one of the most promising solutions and well worth supporting.

The Environmental CleanUp Coalition are are seeking funding for an Ocean Gyre Cleanup Contest and prototype development of the best concept.

Looking somewhat like a green lobster, this boat funnels waste into a hopper. As you can see the vessel is manned and the hopper is rather small for our liking. But it is a start. It looks a lot like the proposed Dyson river cleaning barge, or is that the other way around.

Once plastic has been harvested from the ocean, these are just 3 of the suggested sustainable solutions as to what to do with it.

1) Turning scrap plastic into structural lumber, Bedford Technology http://www.plasticboards.com

2) Turning plastic into fuel oil: http://jbiglobal.com/

3) Gasification: Has been approved by the California EPA to burn waste materials for electricity. http://www.gasification.org/

19-year-old Boyan Slat unveiled plans to create an Ocean Cleanup Array that could remove 7,250,000 tons of plastic waste from the world’s oceans. Since then studies have show that figure to be nearer 270,000 tons. Boyan's concept consists of an anchored network of floating booms and processing platforms that could be dispatched to garbage patches around the world. An array would span the radius of a garbage patch, acting as a giant funnel. The project claims low overheads and high capture efficiency that with the recycling of plastics, will cost €4,50 for every kg of plastic removed - said to be about 33 times less expensive than conventional cleanup methods. Click on the heading above to read more >>>>>>

What's for lunch mum? The Eastern Garbage Patch is a large gyre of marine debris located near the Midway Islands in the Pacific Ocean. Albatrosses in the area give birth to 500,000 chicks every year, and nearly half of them die – many of them after consuming plastic fed to them by their parents, who think it’s food.

Ingestion of plastic flotsam is a problem faced by many seabirds. The amount of plastic in the seas has increased dramatically since the first record in the 1960s, coming from waste discarded by ships, offshore dumping, litter on beaches and waste washed to sea by rivers. It is impossible to digest and takes up space in the stomach or gizzard that should be used for food, or can cause an obstruction that starves the bird directly. Studies of birds in the North Pacific have shown that ingestion of plastics results in declining body weight and body condition. This plastic is sometimes regurgitated and fed to chicks; a study of Laysan albatross chicks on Midway Atoll showed large amounts of ingested plastic in naturally dead chicks compared to healthy chicks killed in accidents. While not the direct cause of death, this plastic causes physiological stress and causes the chick to feel full during feedings, reducing its food intake and the chances of survival.

Plastic waste has a huge detrimental affect on wildlife. Plastic debris causes the deaths of more than a million seabirds every year, as well as more than 100,000 marine mammals. Syringes, cigarette lighters and toothbrushes have been found inside the stomachs of dead seabirds, which mistake them for food. Midway Atoll receives substantial amounts of marine debris from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Of the 1.5 million Laysan Albatrosses that inhabit Midway, nearly all are found to have plastic in their digestive system.

Innovate UK and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) are to invest up to £4.5m in collaborative R&D projects that seek to increase the recovery of valuable materials from waste streams.

The aim of this competition is to improve processes to increase the value of resources recovered from continuously produced waste. Energy from waste is excluded, as the focus is on maximising the value of materials.

Proposals must be collaborative and led by a business managing the target waste stream. Innovate UK expect to fund mainly industrial research projects in which a business partner will generally attract up to 50% public funding for their project costs (60% for SMEs). Projects are expected to last up to 24 months and to have total costs of up to £800k.

This is a two-stage competition that opens for applicants on 12 January 2015. The deadline for registration is at noon on 18 February 2015 and the deadline for expressions of interest is at noon on 25 February 2015.

A briefing event and partnering workshop for potential applicants will be held on 14 January 2015. Knowledge Transfer Network: Wednesday, 14 January 2015 from 09:30 to 16:30 (GMT), Hackney Town Hall
Mare St, E8 1EA London, United Kingdom. This event is organised by Eventbrite, 155 5th St, San Francisco, CA 94103. UK event contact is anna.baginska@ktn-uk.org Support phone number: 0300 321 4357. This initiative is not designed to tackle ocean waste. Pity! There is plenty of Euro money for industrial research, but nothing for oceanic action groups that have no core business to support research.

The five main ocean 'Gyres' have become plastic garbage patches. Does that make you proud to be a human? Not us, we feel ashamed that this is the legacy that we are forcing on wildlife, as we enjoy the spoils of an unsustainable society.

The global waste and recycling market is currently worth around $1tr. The waste sector in the UK was valued at over £12bn in 2011, with an annual growth rate of between 3% and 4%, and that means more plastic garbage for our oceans.

A material recovery industry has been evolving from a waste management infrastructure that was designed for efficient transport to landfill. Recycling rates are slowing as the limits of this system are reached. Once again indicating that the present system is not sustainable.

According to WRAP (Waste & Resources Action Programme), only around 22% of the resource flows in the UK are fed back in to the economic cycle, and more than £5bn worth of recovered materials are sent abroad for reprocessing. An easy out is to dump shipments in the oceans.

Manufacturers need to respond to rising raw material costs, increasing volatility in raw material availability and the environmental impact of raw material acquisition and product disposal. These factors directly affect their viability and profitability leading to the inevitable shortcuts.

PLASTIC WASTE PRODUCERS 2010 - This map of the world illustrates plastic waste producers in relation to poor management - hence, the likelihood of pollution of international waters. It is a useful visualization, telling us where to begin cleaning up for maximum results globally. The problem with this approach may be that the biggest polluters may not want to tackle their problem patch, relying on the efforts of other countries to do their dirty work for them. In theory, the culprit sovereign state could be prosecuted for allowing their manufacturers to mismanage waste to this degree. How about it chaps. It's no rocket science. You need to set a case precedent, to create an example of what will follow if a more responsible attitude is not adopted. Money talks!


Carol Browner	Victor Chu	Obiageli Ezekwesili	Luiz Furlan	Vladimir Golitsyn	Robert Hill	Yoriko Kawaguchi
.	.	.	.	.	.	.

Pascal Lamy	Paul Martin	Sri Mulyani Indrawati	Cristina Narbona	Ratan Tata	Foua Toloa	Andrés Velasco

LOBBY YOUR OCEAN REPRESENTATIVE - These are the people to write to with your complaints and where appropriate; evidence. The Global Ocean Commissioners are a group of exceptionally well qualified persons with the experience needed to be able to formulate a plan that might work to reverse the present degradation of our oceans. The GOCs will not just deal with ocean pollution, but will also seek to regulate fishing to assist in fish stock recovery. We hope they will be able to make a difference. They are supported by Pope Francis, President Obama, Ban Ki-moon and even Leonardo di Caprio. There are 17 members of the GOC, divided as 12 men and 5 women. So far they have elected to do nothing about the mounting mountain of plastic in our seas.

The Plastic Oceans Foundation is a registered United Kingdom Charity (Number 1139843). We are dedicated to protecting and improving the environment. Through a wide range of activities the Foundation will educate, provide a resource base for study and research, campaign for improvements in legislation and policy, raise funds for the development of solutions and develop a worldwide integrated social media network aimed at achieving the mission.

SEAWER SKYSCRAPER - The Seawer is a self-supported hydroelectric power station that can generate electricity using seawater at the same time that it cleans up plastic waste. The huge structure separates plastic particles and fluids, recycles seawater and releases it back into the ocean. The structure receives energy from the sun, ocean and plastics and moves slowly from one polluted area to the next. The project received an honorable mention in the 2014 eVolo Skyscraper.

Millions of tons of trash enter the ocean each year and cluster in particular areas of the world’s oceans. One of the most infamous plastic debris patches is located in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, commonly referred to as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (GPGP).
This piece of “plastic soup” is twice the size of Texas and contains six times more plastic than plankton biomass. Seawer skyscraper was designed to tackle this issue while generating electricity at the same time. South Korean designer Sung Jin Cho submitted the Seawer Skyscraper project as his proposal for this year’s eVolo Skyscraper Competition. The project includes a huge drainage hole 550 meters in diameter and 300 meters in depth that would be located at the heart of the GPGP. The structure consists of five layers of baleen filters that separate plastic particles and fluids. The particles are taken to an onboard recycling plant while purified seawater is stored in a large sedimentation tank at the bottom of the structure before it is released back into the ocean.

DAILY MAIL SERIOUS OR SPOOF ? - An island the size of Hawaii made entirely from plastic bottles could become the hottest postcode on earth, and is part of an incredible environmental vision for the future.

CGI images show how a team of Dutch scientists plan to take 44 million kilos of plastic waste currently bobbing around in the Pacific Ocean and transform it into Recycled Island.

Solar and wave energy will be used to sustain the island and its 500,000 inhabitants.

A spokesman for the project said: 'The proposal has three main aims; cleaning our oceans from a gigantic amount of plastic waste; creating new land; and constructing a sustainable habitat.

'Recycled Island seeks the possibilities to recycle the plastic waste on the spot and to recycle it into a floating entity.'

The Pacific Ocean currently holds the largest amount of plastic waste in the world. Ocean currents keep the plastic in the sea in giant rubbish dumps, which are fatal to sea life.

The team plans to recycle plastic on the spot - in the North Pacific Gyre - into hollow, floating blocks.

These will become the foundation blocks to the 10,000 square kilometre (3,861 square mile) island.

Alongside the modern city, planners hope to create a large area preserved for agriculture.

The island will be designed as self-sufficient, providing food and work for the inhabitants.

The spokesman added: 'Recycled Island should be seen as a unique opportunity to create a new floating habitat from scratch, yet at the same time the ocean is cleaned from a huge part of its plastic pollution.'

1. In the Los Angeles area, 10 metric tons of plastic are carried into the Pacific Ocean every day.

2. 50 percent of the plastic we use, we use just once and throw away.

3. We currently recover only five percent of the plastics we produce.

4. The average American throws away approximately 185 pounds of plastic per year.

5. Plastic accounts for around 10 percent of the total waste we generate.

5. The production of plastic uses around eight percent of the world’s oil production.

6. Americans throw away 35 billion plastic water bottles every year.

8. Approximately 500 billion plastic bags are used worldwide every year.

9. 46 percent of plastics float (EPA 2006) and drift for years before concentrating in the ocean gyres.

10. It takes 500-1,000 years for plastic to degrade.

11. 80 percent of pollution enters the ocean from the land.

12. In the Great Pacific Garbage Patch plastic pieces outnumber sea life six to one.

13. Plastic constitutes approximately 90 percent of all trash floating on the ocean’s surface.

14. One million sea birds and 100,000 marine mammals are killed annually from plastic in our oceans.

15. 44 percent of all seabirds & 22 percent of cetaceans have plastic in or around their bodies.

16. 93 percent of Americans age six or older test positive for BPA (a plastic chemical).

A 3D model of the Drone 1-001-1 from Elie Ahovi. The Drone 1-001-1 concept features a steel body construction with composite materials for strength and lightweight operation. Its battery-powered motors are quiet and efficient. Ahovi estimates the drone could remain submerged for about two weeks before needing a charge. The ocean drone concept uses an infrasound system to help it navigate away from schools of fish and larger underwater objects. The submarine would need to be launched and recovered by human operators of a medium sized ship. We think that this will raise the cost of plastic recovery to unacceptable levels. A better system would be for a complete process that needs no crew.

MARILAO - MEKONG - MISSISSIPPI - NIGER - NILE - PARANA - PASIG - SARNO - THAMES - YANGTZE - YAMUNA - YELLOW

HONG KONG - As of 2013, 40% of the world’s ocean surfaces were covered with some form of floating plastic trash. The statistics are sobering, but a growing number of companies and organizations including Ocean Recovery Alliance are eyeing solutions to the burgeoning plastic waste issue. Innovative solutions to manage plastic waste, both pre and post consumption will specially be showcased on June 6th at Plasticity Hong Kong, in a big discussion on plastic and innovation in this sector.

Plasticity Hong Kong was a one-day conference designed to inspire, excite, and help move the world to follow the innovative leaders who use plastic in new ways. The event followed on from the successful launch at the Rio+20 Earth Summit, and showcased new solutions which help not only to build brand value, but which help to reduce the impact that plastic has on the environment.

This conference was to fuel a re-imagining of the future of plastics through a program of keynotes, case studies, and panel discussions, where many leading players of the “plastics puzzle” are brought together under one roof. Attendees of the forum came from wide-ranging sectors, including textiles, retailers, manufacturers, recyclers, design and packaging, waste-to-fuel companies, bio-plastic producers and government policy makers.

This unique one-day event, organized by Ocean Recovery Alliance, took place at Asia Society, Hong Kong Centre from 9:00am to 5:30pm. It was followed by a cocktail reception at 6:00pm. Keynote speakers include Ms. Christine Loh, Under Secretary for the Environment for the HKSAR, Mike Biddle, CEO of MBA Polymers, and winner of the prestigious Gothenburg Sustainability Award (previously won by Kofi Annan and Al Gore), Dr. Ulrich Liman, Vice President of Production and Development at Bayer Material Science, Steve Davies of Nature Works, Phil King of Method and Dasdy Lin from the Taiwan Plastic Industry Development Center.

The event brought together leading practitioners from plastic supply chains, procurement, packaging, bio materials, branding, recycling and post-consumer waste management. On June 5th, the day’s innovation-packed agenda included two side events, including an environmental conflict resolution series talk with Hong Kong University at the Hong Kong Stock Exchange Auditorium on waste management issues which are now particularly relevant to Hong Kong. June 7th included a factory visit to MBA Polymers’ high-tech plastics recycling plant in China, one of the most advanced in the country.

“The brands that will win will be the ones which admit that the communities they serve have a problem with plastic waste; which take the lead in making improvements; and which are part of that solution”, stressed Doug Woodring, event organizer and co-founder of Ocean Recovery Alliance.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1290525/Plastic-paradise-Scientists-plan-turn-Pacific-Ocean-waste-floating-island.html

http://www.traveldailynews.asia/news/article/52369/plasticity-2013-hong-kong-serves

http://ecowatch.com/2014/04/07/22-facts-plastic-pollution-10-things-can-do-about-it/

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/sailing-the-atlantic-ocean-to-study-plastic-pollution

http://education.nationalgeographic.co.uk/education/encyclopedia/ocean-gyre/?ar_a=1

PROOF OF CONCEPT - The above vessel is a significantly modified version of the Bluefish ZCC concept, adapted to clean garbage from the world's ocean gyres. The SeaVax is a robotic ocean workhorse that is based on a stable trimaran configuration. This design uses no diesel fuel to cruise the oceans autonomously (COLREGS compliant) 24/7 and 365 days a year as required. With such awesome power generating capability, a SeaVax ZCC can extract plastic waste from deep sea ocean garbage patches. Several of these cleaners operating as Atlantic, Indian and Pacific ocean fleets could make such conservation measures cost effective, and even potentially attractive to governments around the world - for the health of the world. Recovered plastic could be processed to produce oil, energy or recycled products. Better than letting fish and seabirds eat the waste and kill themselves, and who knows how that may affect us, where seafood is an essential resource for mankind. You can help Bluebird Marine Systems take this design to a full size pre-production prototype by donating whatever you can afford when we are ready to accept crowd funding contributions. Thanks for reading this and please spread the news.

FACTORY SHIP PROPOSAL - The above diagram rather nicely illustrates a logical sequence for harvesting ocean plastic, transferring to a floating factory and (presumably) transporting the resulting products to end users. It is unfortunate that a ship such as this would not be capable of harvesting sufficient plastic to warrant operation at sea. The only realistic way is to increase the harvesting capacity using dedicated machines, and then to feed that harvest to a factory ship, or ships.