There’s trash in the ocean and it causes problems. Both marine animals and land animals can be impacted by water pollution because almost all living creatures depend on water to survive. Not to mention, humans have polluted our own ports and waterways, making it more difficult to travel and participate in global commerce. It would be nice if everything we produced was edible or quickly degradable but that seems to be an unrealistic task for modern society but might be a realistic task for robots.
Robots that “eat” trash are becoming an increasingly popular solution to water pollution. I use the word “eat” loosely because most of these robots are simply trash collectors, but I feel like the idea of eating trash provides a more interesting visual. One popular autonomous trash collector has been dubbed FRED (Floating Robot for Eliminating Debris). It’s a robot with a big conveyor belt that can collect trash and take it back to land, where it can be properly disposed of. It’s powered by solar panels and undergone significant testing on the coasts of California.
Smaller robots like the Jellyfishbot were deployed off the coasts of southern France. They pull around large nets which collect trash in the port which is slightly different to FRED’s conveyor belt. One reason ocean cleanup has been so lackluster historically is that it’s expensive and slow. While neither of these robots is cheap, they only need to be built once and then repaired occasionally so they could significantly bring down the costs of picking up pollution. However, these robots are only one part of the solution.
Picking up the waste is a solution to the problem of trash that’s already in the ocean, but it would be better in the long term to stop the majority of trash from getting to the ocean in the first place. These ocean cleanup projects are still necessary to get rid of the trash that’s already there, but these robots can’t prevent more trash being added to the ocean. Many countries have begun introducing plastic restrictions, but we are still a long way from getting rid of the majority of single-use and unrecyclable plastics.
We still have a long way to go with cleaning up the oceans. Another major limitation is that a robot like FRED can only consistently pick up plastics bigger than 5 millimeters. Much of the ocean’s plastic pollution becomes microplastics which are much smaller but equally problematic. The full effects of microplastics are still largely unknown, but there is major concern about their effect on living creatures because they can often go through water filtration systems undetected and end up in many of the seafood that we consume.
Despite the barriers that have limited our progression to cleaning up the ocean, some progress is better than none and these ocean-cleaning startups are a good beginning to a much longer and arduous process of removing waste from the ocean.
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