In the battle to curb plastic and garbage pollution in the oceans, we’ve turned to drones. In just a couple years, our technology has gotten more and more sophisticated. Starting with skimmers that only clear the very top layer of the ocean, they’re now closer resembling the Mars Rover.
Nikoleta Bellou from the Institute of Coastal Research Helmholtz-Zentrum Hereon had this to say about sea-cleaning solutions:
Unfortunately more focus at a policy level is being given to banning single-use plastics. But we already have polluted the oceans and we need to do something to retrieve that, simultaneously to all the actions needed to reduce pollution at the source.
We still have a lot of work to do to curb the use of single-use plastics, but we also have to clean up our oceans as well. According to an article from Bloomberg on the new rovers, “as many as 91 million metric tons of litter entered the oceans between 1990 and 2015, as much as 87% of which was plastic.”
Source: TechTics/Project.BB
The BeachBot (pictured above) collects cigarette butts, plastics, and other garbage left behind on the beach. The BeachBot’s prototypes have been deployed across the Netherlands and their creators, Martijn Lukaart and Edwin Bos are ready to push the BeachBot worldwide.
Unfortunately, these robots won’t be enough to stop all the plastic pollution in our oceans, we need immediate action on single-use plastics in the United States. It starts with us creating better solutions to this kind of waste.
Source: Bloomberg
Save Our Pacific 