Following the announcement made on June 24, that the Ocean Cleanup is ready to re-begin operations, it is ready to operate in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch this summer. The latest version of this design, dubbed System 001/B, has arrived in the patch after eight days of transit.
Specifically, according to Ocean Cleanup’s statement, the deployment of System 001/B went very smoothly.
The Maersk transporter arrived in Vancouver, coming from San Diego. After the arrival, the system was connected to the vessel and the crew prepared for their journey. The vessel is no able to travel faster and transmit time is less, almost one week of travel in total, as the team decided not to tow with the skirt attached to the system and have less loads on the system in general.
Along the route, whales and albatrosses were spotted. The team knew they were getting close as the plastic sightings began to increase substantially. Upon arrival, the crew deployed the system into the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and arranged it in its operational configuration (U-shape).
Following additional setup in the next day, the team can begin conducting the tests.
In the past, the Ocean Cleanup reported some problems that made the progress of the project difficult to continue.
The team behind the project, collected data and analyzed them in order to understand what caused the two problems, which are:
- The system hasn’t been able to retain the plastic it caught;
- The floater suffered from a structural failure, causing an 18-meter end section to disconnect from the rest of the system, just before the end of 2018.
Therefore, the Ocean Cleanup published a report to explain the results of the analysis.
