That Great Pacific Garbage Patch Cleaning Device Is Finally Working

t's been six years since Boyan Slat began developing a system to rid the world's oceans of harmful plastic. In 2013, the entrepreneur founded The Ocean Cleanup, a nonprofit that aims to remove plastic from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a trash-filled vortex in the Pacific Ocean that's more than twice the size of Texas.
The system's ability to trap microplastics came as a surprise, The Ocean Cleanup's previous research had suggested that microplastics rain down like ash toward the bottom of the ocean and so should be less likely to stay floating close to the surface.

Laurent Lebreton, one of the organisation's researchers, previously told Business Insider that a lot of the debris the device was catching "is really weathered and broken down, and some of it looks really old."

He added: "We don't really find any plastic bags or straws, but we find really thick, hard plastic fragments."

The team has now demonstrated that the device can retain various types of plastic, thanks to a new parachute system that debuted in June

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Last Edited by sacred energy on 10/03/2019 07:12 AM