CLEAN UP PLASTICS FROM THE OCEAN

I'm back! After a few weeks of total disconnection, now is time to return to work.
Before Christmas holidays, in technology classes we saw a video about a boy with an idea to rid clean up our oceans of plastic, which curiously is the new unit.

Unless you have been living in a cave for almost your entire life, you probably know the plastics' constant polemical. In short, they are an endless nightmare for those animals that habit the sea. It is sufficient knowing that scientists calculate that approximately 150 tons of plastic are invading our seas and oceans, representing the 70% of their actual pollution.

BUT, WHY IS THIS PROBLEM SO ALARMING?

Moreover, plastics are not biodegradable. In easy words, they do not disappear by themselves in a relatively short period of time, as for example, oranges do. Their degradation can last hundreds of years!! For example, those plastic rings of a 6 pack of drinks' cans take 450 years.

In addition, some animals confuse them with food and eat them. This can cause very dangerous problems, and in the majority of cases, death. There are a lot of images very hard to see.

But it seems that someone has the solution: Boyan Slat. Maybe his name isn't familiar to you, but he is like a modern superhero. He is going to save thousands of animals and, perhaps, the humanity. Do you want to know him?

We can define Boyan Slat as an inventor of the XXI century. He is a dutch 22 year old young man with a revolutionary mind. He was only a teenager when the first ideas came to him, while he was swimming underwater looking for fish in Grece. But he realised that there were more plastic stuff than anything else. This was an inflection point in his life, and he decided to change this situation by creating this:

WHAT IS THIS?

This is the result of his idea. He thought that it might be possible that the oceans' water could clean up themselves (with a bit of help). How? By installing giant floating barrers and wait for the tides to drag the rubish. Once the rubbish is all concentrated, they move towards a plataform located in a strategic place that collects them. It is expected that in 10 years, this sistem will collect the half of the plastics in the pacific ocean, which will be reused.

Obviously, this doesn't cause any tipe of damage to the aquatic animals! 

(In the official web page, linked below, there is a more complete and technical description)

Explained in this way sounds very easy, but it isn't. He has been perfectionating the project for a couple of years, together with a group of 100 scientists and engineers that nowadays work in the same project.

He first designed a (compared to the other) small device for examining the quality of plastics, and used it in the Mediterranean Sea. Then, he recreate the sea at a swimming pool and check if his project was progressing. Finally, before carrying out definitively his invention, he wanted to test it in the North Sea.

The cost of erasing the human traces is about 300 million dolars, almost 33 times less than others sugestions. At the beggining, when this project was just an idea, he raised the money by publishing his plans throughout a web page. People bet on him and they contribute economically. Definetively, is a very good option for those potential inventors.

I had never heard of Boyan until the day we saw the video in class. Personally, I think he is an admirable person! With only 22 years, he has founded the Oceans' Clean Up and won a lot of awards because of his task. I have to say that at the beginning I was not very enthusiast about this topic; it looked very boring. But, as I was investigating, I realised that it was more interesting than I though, and I have really enjoyed doing this entry. He can be an inspiration for a lot of people, proving that sometimes the most hare-brained ideas are the best ones! Who was going to tell that a giant barrer was the solution to the humans' neglect?

Personally, a good idea is to directly do not throw the rubbish at the sea. But considering that the world's whole population is not going to do that, another solution can be to create a kind of extra-strong magnet that attracts plastics. How? I don't really know, I guess by modificating the structure of the molecules of the elements that form a magnet. And the rest is the same, the magnet will take all the objects collected to a platform and after this, they will be reused. Or another option will be to create another material by combining different substances previously modificated in a lab according to the necessities, that substitutes the use of plastic. Obviously, it has to be biodegradable and easy to digest in the case an animal eats it, as well as it has to be able to adapt to a determinate shape. In this way, no more turtles (and more animals, but mostly turtles) will drown.

Thank you for reading!

RESOURCES USED:

http://elblogverde.com/que-es-biodegradable/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/inspired-life/wp/2016/02/01/can-the-largest-cleanup-in-history-save-the-ocean/?utm_term=.b6bb7d0424bf

https://youtu.be/hmPHBhYaCR4?list=LLSLIyDr50WeSZWmVlSFxr9Q

https://www.theoceancleanup.com/

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-ocean-clean-up-kid?utm_source=motherboardyoutube