glorifiedfishguts-blog

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Photo project by Chris Jordan displaying the effects of plastic pollution on Laysan Albatrosses’.

http://ocean.si.edu/slideshow/laysan-albatrosses%E2%80%99-plastic-problem

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Boyan Slat, a 21 year old Dutch engineering student, is the inventor of the structures responsible for the foundation of the project The Ocean Cleanup. The Ocean Cleanup is the world’s first passive clean up solution to the plastic contaminating the oceans. The Ocean Cleanup Array, which is the structure itself, is a free floating network of barriers that extract plastic for recycling or to be converted into oil. These V-shaped devices can be attached to the seabed in the midst of an ocean gyre to capture the plastic as it circles through the currents, a non-permeable screen is located under the floating buoys and is suspended just above the current so that most of the current and creatures residing in it will pass under the screen but the plastic will be extracted due to its buoyancy. The captured plastic is then funneled to a center structure for storage until it is taken ashore where the plastic will be collected for recycling or to be transformed into oil.  A single 100 km long structure that will be used in The Ocean Cleanup would be able to clean up roughly half of The Great Pacific Garbage Patch in a matter of 10 years. This innovative technology is helping to raise awareness about ocean pollution as well as inspiring ideas for “spinoff” technology to enable river cleanups as well, and prevent the trash from ever reaching the ocean.

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The greatest threat to our planet is the belief that someone else will save it.

Robert Swan

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Seals are particularly playful marine mammals and they are naturally very curious, too often a seal pup will stick its head through a net or become wrapped in fishing line. While it is easy for them to put their head through the hole, the lay of the fur that helps protect them from the cold prevents them from being able to pull their head back out. If the animal is lucky it will die of infection, however the more common circumstance is the baby seal growing up with the net still wrapped around its neck. As they grow larger it tightens, severing arteries and cutting off blood circulation, the animal is eventually strangled to death and after the carcass decomposes, the plastic still remains, waiting for another prisoner.

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The “21st century leviathan” visualized.

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Modern Day Crisis

Over the past ten years a modern epidemic has come to light. It began with the discovery of millions of tons of plastic stretching for hundreds of miles out towards the horizon. In 1992, Captain Charles Moore became the first to discover and report the sheer volume of plastic accumulation in the North Pacific Ocean gyre. He described his find as

 “...the 21st century Leviathan. It had no head, no tail. Just an endless body.” (“Our Oceans are Turning into Plastic… are we?” 2). RJ�hO�<

http://www.menshealth.com/guy-wisdom/water-pollution 

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Introduction to the Mindset behind this Problem

Plastic pollution contaminating the world’s oceans is a modern day crisis. This popular material is used in nearly every aspect of consumer products, most of which ends up getting thrown out after one use. This petroleum based toxin is destroying marine ecosystems and killing thousands of marine mammals, turtles, sharks, crustaceans and unimaginable numbers of fish every year.  In fact there is so much plastic circulating the planet today that there is an excellent chance that particles of it are circulating through your bloodstream and being distributed throughout your body; almost as an echo to what it is doing to the Earth. Plastic is dangerous in all its forms and comes from a variety of sources, many of them nearly impossible to control, and it is causing detrimental effects to the planet and threatening the health of every inhabitant. If we want to continue calling the Earth home, something needs to change.

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