ISAAC CALVIN A/L SILVESTER

Article:  C. Evans-Pughe, "All at sea cleaning up the pacific garbage," in Engineering & Technology, vol. 12, no. 1, February 2017, pp. 52-55.

A summary on impacts of plastic pollution and engineering measures taken to rectify the issue.

          Our love affair towards plastics since 1950s for its lightness, cheapness, and durability is the reason it has persisted in the sea. Plastics that enters the sea stays afloat and is moved around by the currents into one of the infamous garbage patches. Out of the five vast concentrations of waste plastics in the oceans, the Pacific Garbage Patch is the largest. It is a trash vortex between California and Hawaii with over 140,000 tonnes of floating plastic (12,000 rubbish trucks) washed into the sea from dumps, sewers and rivers. The wave mechanical and sun UV light breaks these plastics into smaller pieces and is eaten by marine animals due its debris smell of a sulphurous compound that these animals have relied on for thousands of years to tell them where to find food. At least one million seabirds and hundreds of thousands of marine mammals die each year due to plastic pollution, according to The Ocean Clean-Up (TOC). TOC is a controversial engineering project that hopes to remove half the Pacific Patch plastic in 10 years using a 100km array of floating barriers moored to the seabed. TOC’s barriers will concentrate the rubbish on to platforms using the offshore circular sea currents (gyres) responsible for pulling plastic rubbish into ocean patches and boats will pick up these plastics for recycling. Besides that, Recycling Technologies by UK is industrialising a form of pyrolysis (decomposing plastics at high temperatures without oxygen) to turn the random mix of waste plastics in our dustbins into a synthetic crude oil called Plaxx.