How can you clean the ocean?

Plastic has revolutionized our way of life since its invention in the 50s. It is strong and durable; so durable that most plastic made in the 50s is still around. It takes about 200 years for a single plastic straw to decompose, 1,000 years for a plastic bottle cap… and a vast amount has found its way into the ocean. The volume of plastic in the marine environment is expected to double in the next 15 years. By 2050, there will likely be more plastic (by weight) in the sea than fish*. With this frightening trajectory in mind, billions are being spent via various public and private initiatives to meet the UN sustainable development goal, find depollution solutions that positively impact the environment, and conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas, and marine resources.

Most of the solutions explored over the past years have proved globally inefficient. Massive cleaning vessels and large nets, for example, would need a thousand years, cost billions, be highly harmful to sea life and lead to large amounts of carbon emissions. However, new creative solutions are emerging to take on the challenges of cleaning our water from plastics.

- One is to work upstream before plastic reaches the ocean. Scientists from the Ocean Clean Up Initiative estimated that 80% of plastic waste is distributed by the 1,000 most polluted rivers, among which 90% of the garbage comes from highly populated urban areas. With that in mind, researchers are working towards collecting waste from the rivers before they join up with the ocean. Capgemini Engineering, for example, has been working since 2020 on developing a fleet of drones that detect and collect plastic and other debris without harming the living ecosystem in the rivers. The 5G Water Cleanbot project develops and prototypes autonomous, clean, and low-cost robots that make the best use of advanced technologies (sensors, 5G, edge computing, AI, autonomous navigation) to clean ports, rivers, and coastal areas.

- Another direction of work is to locate marine plastic litter in oceans more precisely in order to recover it while limiting carbon emissions. Multiple projects are feeding this exercise with a variety of approaches: the European Space Agency, on one hand, is participating in the Remote Sensing for Marine Litter project that aims to use Earth-observation satellites to detect marine plastic waste from space and identify the high waste concentration spots. On the other hand, technology experts such as Capgemini have developed artificial intelligence models that contribute to the understanding and modeling of the Earth's climate, using undersea sensor data and advanced AI algorithms to provide new insights into seasonal patterns of the ocean ecosystem.

- Finally, one of the best ways of fighting waste is to avoid creating it in the first place. More and more engineering teams are taking the environmental cost of their products into consideration when making development decisions, favoring sustainable materials that can be broken down into their underlying components and given a new life in a new product. An additional step for products that may end up in the ocean is to ensure they decompose naturally in the sea. Finally, a well-functioning waste management system is essential for the long-lasting success of the clean-up initiatives.

According to the UN, around 51 trillion microplastic particles currently litter our seas - 500 times more than stars in our galaxy. Can we clean up the ocean within the next decade? Most likely not entirely, but technological advances, combined with tackling pollution at its source, are now fostering new hopes for remediation. With a conjunction of efforts and solutions coming from all corners of the Earth, our blue planet may recover its original cleanness.

New creative solutions are emerging to take on the challenges of cleaning our water from plastics.

Related resources:

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• Innovation takes stamina - Research & Innovation at Capgemini Engineering