Mission to clean up the world's biggest ocean rubbish patch
ADVERTISEMENTEngineers on Saturday set to sea to deploy a rubbish collection device to corral plastic litter floating between California and Hawaii in an attempt to clean up the world’s largest rubbish patch in the heart of the Pacific Ocean.
The 2,000-foot (600-metre) long floating boom was being towed from San Francisco, between California and Hawaii.
The system is a giant U-shaped barrier that will float in the ocean, it is expected to trap some of the 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic.
It allows a support vessel to fish out the collected plastic every few months and transport it to dry land where it will be recycled.
At just 23 years of age, Boyan Slat scooped the European Entrepreneur of the Year award for the system at a Brussels awards ceremony held as part of the European Business Summit.
Slat hopes that his innovative, yet disarmingly simple, system will have cleansed oceans of 90% of their plastic by 2040.
The Dutch inventor spoke to Euronews presenter Jeremy Wilks ahead of the awards back in June.