Dziewiętnastolatek buduje maszynę do oczyszczania oceanów

This 19-Year-Old Is Ready to Build an Ocean Cleanup Machine

Źródło: http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-06-10/this-19-year-old-is-ready-to-build-an-ocean-cleanup-machine#r=nav-r-story

Tłumaczenie słówek na końcu artykułu.

The world’s oceans contain millions of tons of trash, much of it collected into

vast gyres of plastic and debris. Even if humanity stopped putting garbage in

the water today, researchers project that these garbage patches would continue

growing for hundreds of years. One such trash vortex, known as the Great Pacific

Garbage Patch, already spans hundreds of miles.

How do we get all that garbage out? Boyan Slat, a 19-year-old Dutch

aeronautical engineering student, is raising $2 million to build an ocean

cleanup contraption he designed to passively funnel garbage to specific collection

points. Working with a team of over 100 people, he recently released a 528-page

feasibility study detailing how the complex technology works and grappling with

questions of legality, costs, environmental impact, and potential pitfalls.

Slat’s plan, expressed simply, is to deploy several V-shaped floating barriers that

would be moored to the seabed and placed in the path of major ocean currents.

The 30-mile-long arms of the V are designed to catch buoyant garbage and trash

floating three meters below the surface while allowing sea life to pass underneath.

“Because no nets would be used, a passive cleanup may well be harmless to the

marine ecosystem,” he writes in the feasibly study.

Over time, the trash would flow deeper into the V , from which it would then be

extracted. The report estimates that the plastic collection rate would total 65 cubic

meters per day and that the trash would have to be picked up by ship every 45 days.

Slat hopes to offset costs by recycling the collected plastic for other uses.

One limitation is that the Ocean Cleanup machine won’t pick up tiny plastic particles,

which tend to distribute over greater depths and pollute the entire ocean, including

the Arctic. “Particles smaller than 0.1 mm are not caught whereas all particles larger

than 1 mm are estimated to be caught,” wrote the cleanup team via e-mail. Still,

many of these tiny particles have been and will be produced by the breakdown of

larger bits of plastic. “In that view,” wrote the team, “we will greatly reduce the

numberof microscopic particles over time.”

The money to build a pilot version is already trickling in. Barely seven days into

a 100-day crowd funding campaign, the Ocean Cleanup already has more than

3,300 backers who have contributed nearly $200,000.

Vocabulary:

Trash - śmieci

Gyre – ruch wirowy (cyrkulacyjny wody)

Debris – szczątki, odłamki

Patch – plama, łata

Vortex - wir

Span - rozciągać się

Contraption - ustrojstwo

Funnel – lejek, rozdzielać

Feasibility - wykonalność

Deploy - rozmieścić

Grapple – mocować się z

Pitfall – pułapka, ryzyko z czymś związane

Moor - cumować

Buoyant – unosić się na wodzie

Offset - równoważyć

Trickle – ciec, napływać

Backer - osoba, która wspiera finansowo

#ocean #środowisko