Boskalis, a Dutch dredging and maritime company, is to transport and install the world’s first tested-at-sea ocean cleanup system in the North Sea.
The cleaning technology uses long floating barriers that act as an artificial coastline. It catches ocean debris, and although it may pick up other ocean rubbish, its aim is not to collect plastic. The system uses only the ocean’s natural currents to power itself.
The Ocean Cleanup Foundation’s prototype will be installed 23 kilometres off the Dutch coast.
The CEO and founder of The Ocean Cleanup Foundation Boyan Slat has hailed the event as a “historic day on the path towards clean oceans”
The North Sea will host a 100-metre long segment of the floating barrier. Sensors will track the motions and barrier load, giving engineers some idea of the design that will be required to create a system that will be successful in ocean clean-up efforts in turbulent conditions and the challenging environments it may face, particularly during the clean-up of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
Manufacturing, deployment and testing of the North Sea prototype has been budgeted at EUR 1.5 million with Boskalis and the Dutch government each financing one third of this, while the remaining amount has been donated by anonymous person or organisation.
Sharon Dijksma, Dutch Minister for the Environment commented: “We urgently need this initiative to actually clean up the plastic from the mid-ocean gyres, where the pollution is trapped for an indefinite time, to prevent permanent damage due to degradation and fragmentation into dangerous microplastics.”
If the test is successful, the first operational pilot system can be expected to be deployed in late 2017.
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