Considering that the oceans hold more garbage than fish by now, this might be the right time to retrain our fishermen and let them hunt for litter. Several companies offer equipment to fish garbage out of rivers, lakes and harbours. They say they could build larger dustcarts for seas and oceans, too. Send the bill to the disposables industry - and let the cleanup begin.
The British company Water Witch offers two boats that are especially designed to clean up marine debris. The Buddy Catamaran (above and below) is a litter retrieval and waterway maintenance boat for marinas, harbours and inland waterways.
Built from aluminium and designed for ease of operation and low cost of ownership, this road-transportable vessel features a removable basket, which can be lifted and tipped directly into a skip or shore side receptacle for disposal. The boat can filter a water surface of 92 x 92 metres per hour. The filter system can be adjusted to collect different sizes of flotsam.
The Water Witch workboat (below) could be compared to a floating bulldozer and features a powerful front end loader which can lift up to 1000 kg and reach to 3.65m below the waterline. About 100 of them are in use worldwide. A quick-release system ensures a range of loader attachments can be easily fitted in seconds. Attachments available include dredge buckets, log grapples, weed cutters/rippers, access platforms, cranes and more.
Modular skip barges allow recovered debris and waste to be stored and transported using transfer skips employed by waste removal contractors worldwide. Each barge features quick-connect couplings to allow additional units to be connected to suit capacity requirements.
Jackie Caddick, director of Water Witch, recently said in an interview that they could easily build much larger versions of their dustcarts if the money is available (source, in Dutch). Much larger garbage barges already exist (more here) :
The BBC points to 2 large skimmer boats (Thames Clearwater I & II, below) in the river Thames, custom built by Damen Shipyards in the Netherlands and launched in September 2007. The catamarans (24 metres long and 8.20 metres wide) are outfitted with the screening technology currently employed in land-based facilities.
The screens, located near midships, are designed to pick up small debris which is then deposited into storage containers located on deck. Larger debris is captured at the bow in coarse mesh buckets, which also allows the smaller items to pass through and move towards the finer debris screens that are found midships.
Spanish company Marnett offers totally different floating dustcarts, like the one below :
In the US, skimmer boats have been in use since the early 1980s. United Marine International manufactures the TrashCat, which comes in 3 sizes (pictures below). About 100 of them are in use worldwide. They are capable of collecting up to 1200 cubic feet (34 cubic meters) of floating debris per load. US company Alpha Boats sells similar machines.
Maybe we don't even need new boats. Fishing boats are very good at (unintentionally) catching marine debris. Fishing for litter is a North Sea project that encourages fishermen to collect garbage they find in their fishing nets. The cooperation of the vessels and their crew is without financial compensation, but recently a Belgian minister decided to pay fishermen 10 euro per garbage bag they bring on shore.
KDD
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Cargo ships, then and now : which one is fastest?
Ocean liners : from London to New York in 3 days and 12 hours.
The Kalakala : the art of slow travel.
The Ictíneo : a steam powered submarine.
The Aeromodeller II : the zeppelin that never lands.
The Hennepin Crawler : macho pedal power.
Trolleytrucks and trolleybuses : electric transport for a bargain
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(1)
they should use these to clean the pacific trash vortex.
Posted by: cocaman | July 26, 2010 at 10:55 PM
(2)
There is another important manufacturer of these machines that is not mentioned in the article: Aquarius (US). Find them here: http://www.aquarius-systems.com
Posted by: Kris De Decker | February 07, 2012 at 10:41 PM