See full version: Boat of the Week: This 185-Foot Sea-Cleaning Sailboat Collects up to 3 Tons of Ocean Garbage per Hour
“During my racing career, I’ve missed out on records and broken my boat 12 times from hitting ocean debris,” Bourgnon told Robb Report. “I’ve circumnavigated the world twice in my life, once at the age of 12 with my parents, and another 30 years later. The difference in the amount of plastic pollution was alarming. I knew something had to be done.” more
World-record sailor Yvan Bourgnon is the mastermind behind the venture. During 20 years of transatlantic competitions and various solo world tours (including the first person to sail solo from Alaska to Greenland), he witnessed a sharp increase in ocean pollution. In 2015, he was forced to abandon the Transat Jacques Vabre yacht race after his sailboat struck plastic debris in the Bay of Gascogne.
Bourgnon’s response was to set up The SeaCleaners NGO in 2016, a consortium of over 58 engineers, technicians and researchers comprising five research laboratories and 17 external partners to build a solution: The Manta.
Built from low-carbon steel, the Manta is a virtuous energy recovery unit wrapped up in a 185-foot sailboat design. It features a custom electric hybrid propulsion system enabling it to travel at controlled speeds of between two and three knots, the optimum speed for waste collection. Around 500kW of onboard renewable energy is generated via two wind turbines located at the stern, 500 square meters of photovoltaic solar panels at the bow, two hydro-generators under the boat and a Waste-to-Electricity Conversion Unit (WECU) used to power the hotel load, or what the captain and crew consume.
The system includes a tapered three-metre skirt to catch plastic floating just below the surface. [links]
"And that's now what we've been able to resolve by having what you call a corkline, so a sort of a large barrier that's floating on the surface, which prevents plastic from actually leaving the system again," he said. [links]
"It's the first time actually anyone harvests plastic from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, from this giant fishing net all the way down to the micro plastic range," he added.
It was towing a 600 metre (2,000-foot)-long boom device designed by Slat dubbed System 001, aimed at containing floating ocean plastic so it can be scooped up and recycled. [links]
Slat came up with the idea seven years ago, drawing it on a paper napkin when he was still in high school. more
Boyan Slat, a 21-year-old who gained worldwide recognition two years ago for his ambitious plan to rid the oceans of plastics, is one step closer to making his idea a reality. His foundation just raised the 1.5 million euros they needed to test their technology in real-life conditions, which will take place in the North Sea this summer.
Even if it works, there will still be the questions of: How do we get the plastics out of the ocean, and what do we then do with them? So w e’ll need to deploy a pilot to test our extraction system, likely in Japan in 2017. here
What problems still need to be solved? more
Rotterdam (Netherlands) (AFP) - A special ship designed to clean the oceans has harvested its first plastic from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch since setting sail from San Francisco last month, its Dutch inventor said Wednesday.
The Maersk Launcher ship finally sailed from San Francisco on September 9 for trials on cleaning the patch, a floating trash pile twice the size of France that swirls in the ocean halfway between California and Hawaii. here
The system has been undergoing tests for the past year. more