Interview with Joost Dubois
We develop technologies to remove plastics from the high seas.
We've developed this system of very long floating barriers with a screen underneath that reaches down
several meters, floating along with the currents in such a way that there is a pressure difference on one side of
the system to other. So the plastic that is moving around in the currents on the ocean is actually floating against
our barriers and collected because of the shape. The shape is like a horseshoe.
And then because of the pressure of the water, the current coming in, the plastic concentrates in the middle.
So it comes through a level of concentration that we can actually lift it out, bring it back on shore for recycling.
And how did the founder Boyan Slat idealized the project having only 16 years?
Yes.
Boyan was sixteen years old when he was on a vacation in Greece.
And during a dive, realized there were more plastic bags than fish that he saw.
And that made him think and that's the way the guy is, like, "why don't we clean this up?"
"Why is nobody doing something about it?" And then he started a high school project.
He needed to do a high school project so he defined this project to think of something to clean the oceans.
Rather than two weeks, It took him a year, I think, and he presented this and it got the attention from
somebody who was working at the university.
So he was invited to come and do a presentation at the university and there was somebody from the local TED,
the TEDx Delft saw him and invited him to a TEDx that was filmed, it got online and after a year it went viral.
And that is basically how it started. So it really started rolling.
And then he realized that he started something that he couldn't stop anymore.
What were the difficulties in developing this unprecedented technology?
Yeah. Something we've never done that nobody had ever done before.
Basically, to break it down into two major challenges that we had: was on the one side, what is out there?
How big is the problem, really? What does it look like?
So we went out for the mega expedition, as we called it.
We've sailed out with 30 ships, collected plastic, a massive effort to build a sample database of
plastic from the Northern Pacific.
After we'd done that, we realized that there might still be statistical challenges in extrapolating the information
that we got from these 30 boats to the entire area, which is three times the size of France, two times the size
of Texas sort of. What we did next was we rented an airplane, fitted it out with the most
advanced censoring equipment that you could think of and went over the place so you can cover
a much larger area than with the 30 boats.
And we had all these measuring points, so we use that to detect larger pieces of debris.
And putting all of that together, led to a publication that we're bringing out and scientific reports, which
will tell you or will tell the whole world, how much plastic is out there. How big is it?
What kind of plastics did we find? What is the size distribution of the plastic?
There's a lot of attention for microplastics. However, what we find is that, of the plastic in that area,
92% is bigger, so it's not microplastics. So 8%, in weight, it's microplastics and in number of pieces,
microplastics win, but in actual mass, in the amount of product that is out there, 92% is larger than five millimeters.
The other thing we did, next to identifying the problem, was the engineering of the system.
So there's a very big system we're talking about, about floaters that are one to two kilometers in size.
We're still determining the final optimal size and it shouldn't break, because you are very far away from shore.
2000 kilometers away from San Francisco, 2000 kilometers away from Hawaii.
There's nothing out there, there's no support. So if you put a system there, you should be pretty certain that it
works, that it is not breaking and that it doesn't need a lot of maintenance.
So you try to make it as simple as possible. Take out moving parts, look very carefully at all the work that
has been done on other engineering challenges and try to put something together that combines it all
and kind of withstand that situation for many years. And that's a big challenge.
We did an enormous amount of testing on scale models, on prototypes.
We put models out in the North Sea, stuff breaks, we check the ultimate limit conditions of materials
that we're using. And now we're ready. We have a full design.
We are ordering the first equipment to come into San Francisco for construction and it's going to be built.
When will it be launched?
The next stages are coming up very clear now, in April we will do a toe test in the Bay of San Francisco
with a part of the system, which is important because we need to determine at what speed we can
tow the barrier out to the great pacific garbage patch. It's a very long distance.
So even if you can do a tiny bit faster, it reduces the time of transfer enormously.
The next stage is when we're going to finalize the system. It's going to be 600 meters, 2000 feet
in length and we will tow it out to the international waters, which is 200 nautical miles away from San Francisco.
And then we'll let it go for the first time. It will float. It will be autonomous and we can validate all our
computer models that we have made to predict how the system will behave.
We hope for some weather, see how it works, how it holds up.
Maybe we get some stuff that we still need to check and adapt, take that back to shore again,
which is again, it's a long trip - two hundred miles is already taking a couple of days - make final
adjustments and then on the second half of May...
This was second half of May, that was the test and then in late July we will depart from San Francisco,
under the Golden Gate Bridge to the Great Pacific garbage patch.
Hopefully bringing back the first plastic onshore, October or November.
It's hard to predict, so we're depending on how much plastic is actually floating there, where we'll put the
system, but we're confident that by the end of the year we have proven the concept of the Ocean Cleanup.
Will the equipment also be able to capture the microplastics?
Okay. Well there's a number of things I need to tell you about this.
So first of all, our system is designed to remove plastics larger than 10 millimeters.
The definition of microplastics is smaller than 5, so we will not touch the microplastic problem.
On the other hand, as already indicated, 80, 92% - so only 8% of the product or the mass that is
around there is microplastics. So that is the portion we won't be able to capture. It's a little bit more.
It's 10% because we have the 10 millimeter break and not the 5 millimeters.
So the majority of the material we will be able to collect.
What is important is that this material is shedding microplastics as it is.
We have, for example, found a bottle crate which is about this big, It's dated back to 1977.
You can see, if you hold it, you can see that it has been in the ocean for decades and it's smells of the ocean,
it's very worn and if you rub your finger over it, you can feel that you are removing particles.
And that's exactly what's happening. So you have these big parts that are slowly moving into waves and the
little parts of plastic, the microplastics, are shedding off of these big ones. It's a mine for microplastics.
It will deliver microplastics for the coming decades before that big piece is completely gone.
So we think it's a ticking time bomb. These big parts need to be removed as soon as possible
to avoid have the continued add to the microplastic problem.
What are the goals, in terms of quantity, of plastics removal?
The system is designed to remove five tons of plastic per month.
Eventually we will remove tens of thousands of tons in total.
The maximum, because there's going to be a peak, we will ramp up our cleanup effort in two years
and then we reach a peak of removal, which will be, I cannot give you the actual number,
but it will be more than 10,000 tons a year and it then will slowly go down again because we are
removing plastics, so the efficiency per system is actually going down.
The total amount of plastic will be reported soon, so I'm keeping that a little bit of a secret,
but it's a staggering amount of material that we will remove.
Are you going to focus only on the Pacific Ocean or in the other oceans as well?
Yeah, we will start in the North Pacific for a simple reason, it's the worst place so the chance of success is highest.
And we do need success, because success will drive the funding of the follow up operations, we hope.
But after that, the ambition is definitely to go to the other gyres and put our cleanup systems there as well.
If everything goes well and we do manage also to, as a population of this planet, to reduce the influx
of plastic from the rivers and the coast into the oceans,
our calculations show we should be able to remove 90 percent of the plastic by 2040.
How did you manage to finance all this?
Yeah, we started with crowdfunding and we managed to raise a staggering $2.2 million US dollars
to start the Ocean CleanUp and by now, we have raised almost $40 million euros.
So we have continued to work on that and we are funded right now, for the first year of operation for us,
for our system, so we feel very, very confident in that.
But after that we will need to raise much, much more money. Crowdfunding alone is not gonna do it.
So we do address a lot of high net worth individuals and we have a very big network.
It's incredible how many people are concerned about the state of the oceans and apparently we were able
to convince them that what we're doing is a good destination for their money.
And I think that's an important part. The other part is that we do get a lot of support from corporations,
corporations that somehow do something that can be connected to our work either in kind or financially.
And yeah, we're very grateful for that as well.
What kind of maintenance will be needed as soon as the equipment hits the sea?
The systems, when they're out there, will be monitored by the ship who go out to collect the plastic.
And there's all kinds of measurements on the system stood that we will monitor from shore.
And then, when we get signals that something is wrong, that there's water in one of the holes or when
a system is moving to a direction where they're not supposed to go or when we noticed there's breakage
because the tension of the barrier is gone, we will send one of the ships there and go on either a repair
on the spot, which will be very hard, I mean, at the high seas, that's going to be very unlikely,
so probably then the system will have to be towed back in.
But we do, again, as I mentioned before, we do design for minimum maintenance requirements.
So we tried to make it as robust as possible. There's no moving parts, but also there's a lot of electronics with a
solar panel, solar driven electricity to power all the equipment on the system.
There's cameras, there's GPS system, so we try to be as close to them, virtually as we can, so we can send in a support ship, if necessary.
What are the risks of this system affecting marine fauna and how will you deal with it?
Very good point. That's a very good point. There's basically two big concerns that are raised.
We tried to have a very open eye for that. One of them is interaction with marine traffic, so ships that go
through the area and find their way blocked by one or multiple of our systems
and the other one is the interaction with marine life.
We are talking to marine researchers, marine biologists around world, special attention for several aspects,
whether or not the systems are going to attract a lot of fish. If that's going to be a fish aggregation device,
so there'll be like a bar for sharks to go there and then have a great lunch.
The other one is the interaction with marine mammals.
There's a whale migration along the coast and nobody exactly knows where those whales are.
That's one of the things we're finding out. And the other one is turtle, turtle migration.
When we talk to the researchers in the field, it's interesting to see that they realize it,
but what we are offering too is an observation platform in the middle of the ocean.
And so we are talking to a lot of researchers in the marine mammal and turtle field to see whether or not
we can cooperate and provide our presence in the middle of the ocean as a platform for them to do observations.
What we'll do in the first year of operation Is 24/7 for the full year observation on the spot.
So we will be there to see how the interaction of the system, if there's interaction with marine life and how
the interaction is taking place to establish whether or not there are any risks.
In the meantime, we have done a study by an independent agency, CSA Ocean Sciences, who did an
environmental impact study assessments for the systems.
Basically, the answer is that it's all expected to be negligible, but since we've never done it before,
we'd better be there, keep an eye on it and we hope that in one year we have enough data to feel
comfortable about it, that we're safe.
No comments:
Post a Comment