In the last episodes, we’ve saw how serious the situation is… We’ve talked to experts, scientists, environmentalists, politicians, people from all over the world worried about one thing: the situation of our seas. The path seems simple, but the walk is not easy and it seems that only now we’ve started to take the first steps. And maybe the same thing that put us into this situation is what will make us get out of it: creativity and technology.
The first step is to learn the size of the problem. And thanks to recent researches that we now have the notion that we throw more than 8 million tons of plastic annually and there was another very important study led by a woman, Dr Jenna Jambeck, who determined the amount of plastic that we have produced in the world to date: More than 8 billion tons. Trying to visualize that number, so if we all stand, hand to hand, covering the coastline of the world, we would each have in front of us five grocery-sized bags filled with plastic.
And that is what we estimate is going every year. We’ve looked at the available data, we’ve crunched a bunch of numbers from: how much plastic is there out in the environment? What is the most littered?
What is the hardest to recover? And we put together a list of the top 20 products that are most commonly found. It’s no great surprise that we’ve found a lot of waste from food wrappers and candy wrappers and chip wrappers and things like that, straws, plastic utensils.
What I like to say about plastic? Is a incredible material, but when we use it, we design it with intended obsolescence. So when we design things that are meant to be used for a very short amount of time, this is a irresponsible use of a valuable material.
But how do we know all this data? Scientific research done in the field is an expensive thing and it's no use to study the ocean just looking from the beach, right? The drones, as they are open systems, made the whole world to produce and create ideas, making navigators.
So my idea was to try to reconcile the technology of the aerial drone with the underwater ROV. And we use this drone as a work platform to couple probes to water quality measurements. At the same time as it dips, it picks up the values of pH, ORP, oxygen, salinity, temperature, pressure.
We can really study the amount of waste in the water, we can study what effect these particles are giving to the final result of the water. We can do days and months of research at minimal cost. So, the story of the ECO sailboat, like every good story, begins with a dream.
We had the support of FINEP, Financier of Studies and Projects, to make a welded aluminum sailboat, aluminum because it’s a material that doesn’t deteriorate, like steel. Much better for maintenance. We developed a robot to weld the sailboat.
It has thus, an important work in the field of innovation. So the union of Oceanography, Ecology and Mechanical Engineering was instrumental in creating a whole new thing. The ECO has research and teaching objectives and it also has extension goals, because these are the university's triple values.
So these researches are divided into two main focuses: oceanographic research in the water column and research in the reef environment, underwater. The importance of research is to tell us where we are now, at this moment, how is the ocean. So if we know what it's like now, we can make models to predict how it's going to be 20-30 years from now.
We’ll be able to plan changes, make individual and public management attitudes, so that these forecasts may be a little reduced and change this catastrophic situation, I would say, of the current oceans. I'm here on Eric's boat, which is a fisherman who decided he was going to do something to change the garbage situation in the oceans. So what he did was to adapt the fishing technology he had, to create a net mechanism, a trash skimmer and manually take out the rubbish from the sea.
When it’s scattered around the bay, it’s kind of outside of our mind. When I’m condensing it all and putting it in dumpsters and taking pictures of it, it’s amazing the amount of pollution that’s in the water, right here at San Diego. I’ve been doing this for over 5 weeks and I’ve got over 2 thousand pounds and it doesn’t really have been raining that much.
When it rains, I’m might be getting hundreds and hundreds of pounds a day. So every day, he comes here at the Port of San Diego, he gets six hours, picking up trash that comes mostly from land and doing some research on that. He weighs it and looks what kind of trash it is, so that in a year he can get a bigger picture of how much trash has been taken from the bay so this can become a model and methodology for cleaning ports and bays.
Hi, Marina da Glória, in Brazil, there's a lot to be cleaned there! People see it and they say “yeah, it’s sad and it’s gross”, but they don’t have the resources or acknowledge as well. I had to create this boat and I have a captain’s license and I have the piece of equipment to take care of the problem on a bigger scale, because there is so much trash, someone goes and gets one piece of trash out of the water and they’re like “yeah, I’ve got some trash out of the water, that was great!
”, but look at the tens of thousands of pieces that are still on the water. This needs to be a job for somebody. This needs to be just like a street sweeper, just like a garbage collector, somebody needs to be allocated and the funds needs to be there to go and to take care of the problem.
So, the Marina Trash Skimmer can remove anything, from microplastics to large floating objects, such as plastic water bottles. A trash skimmer can collect anything from 25 to 50 pounds of debris per removal, so on a busy day, it can remove a couple hundred pounds of debris, if the conditions warrant it and that so much debris was accumulated. So what you’ll find is the units are not only collecting marine debris, it’s collecting all those pollutants and contaminants.
And any organic material that’s in the unit it’s actually acting like a sponge to absorb the material. The marine ecosystem does start to flourish with all the additional dissolved oxygen that the unit adds to the water. So it’s serving that dual purpose, to not only address marine debris, but improve water quality.
The numbers are estimates, but there is a calculation that there are now over 5 trillion plastic waste scattered in the oceans. Some of these are smaller than a grain of rice and you can forget about them, there’s no way to clean these. But we can do something about macroplastics, except that when they are so far from the coast, a lone boat cannot solve the problem.
We design technologies to remove plastics from the high seas, so we’ve developed this system of very long floating barriers with a screen underneath, that reaches down several meters, floating along with the currents on such a way that there’s a pressure difference on one side of the system to the other. So the plastic that is moving around in the currents in the ocean is actually floating against our barriers and collected, because of the shape. The shape is like a horseshoe and because of the pressure of the water, the current coming in, the plastic concentrates in the middle.
So it comes to a level of concentration that can actually lifted out and bringed back on shore for recycling. Even if we could clean the entire planet, it wouldn’t be enough. Plastic is a very useful material and it will continue to be produced.
If we really want a cleaner future, we need to start investing in alternative materials that replace plastic and do not harm the environment. So, when I was travelling in Thailand and I went to some of the islands and I saw a lot of the plastic devastation that was on the islands and it really sparked kind of a interest on why this was happening. A lot of it was plastic bottles as well, so I came back home and with some of my friends, we’ve did some research into different packaging materials and the recyclability of them.
And we found that cans are infinitely recyclable. And we found that cans are infinitely recyclable. They’re among the most recyclable beverage packaging in the world.
So we decided that it would make sense, that if we wanted to create a new water brand, to do something very different and put in the can, so it had a purpose behind it. Something that was better for the environment than the plastic bottles. We’ve spent a few months developing it, we’ve got an order from a couple of big stockists in the UK, which helped us raise some money to be able to fund our first production and it just started kind of sprawling from that.
Indosole has been in business since 2009, it all started back in 2004, I started doing research and I found that 1. 5 billion waste tires are discarded every year, 60% are collected and burned and what happens when you burn a tire is it releases a really bad toxics, like smoke into the air and when it melts it goes under the ground. So, over the last yer, we’ve spent a lot of time developing a new technology in working with the tire.
Our traditional method had us left with some scraps, so you have basically a frame of the tire where we extracted the sole. This material was getting throw into the trash, we didn’t know what to do with it, but now we have an solution and what we found is that if you take the leftover scraps of the tire and you grind it down, you’re left with a fine, granular powder, which can be then be remodeled into something new. And this type of research is gaining momentum, as is the case of this year's winner of a UN-sponsored innovation award.
So, in the United States, 230 million eggs are born with defects, it means that we cannot use the 230 million eggs. So, our project is collecting those wasted eggs and form them into plastics. And these plastics are very beneficial, because it just takes one step to produce from the eggs to the plastics and so they’re biodegradable.
Our preliminary experiments show that in the ocean it would take about 2 to 3 days and in land it would take about a week to biodegrade. Many of the things that we showed in this episode were started by people who decided to take action alone, without depending on anyone. And this is my proposal to you that want to contribute to cleaner seas.
Let's do an upcycling! If you have no idea, here at Menos1Lixo there are several, but you can basically take a useless piece of plastic and transform it into something that will be useful to you. Don’t forget to share and use #MaresLimpos to inspire your friends to join this campaign as well.
And here’s a thing I didn’t said: during all this walk, I used this sneaker, it is made of tire soles, which is a big environmental problem when you think about the oceans and it is also a simple and practical solution. In the next episode I'll show you other solutions, like this one from Indosole, but that are being made here in Brazil. Come with me and don’t forget to give a like, subscribe and activate the notification bell so when the next video comes out you’ll be the first one to watch it!
