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Planet Plastic

Planet Plastic How Big Oil and Big Soda kept a global environmental calamity a secret for decades

You don’t have to be an early bird to catch a glimpse of next week’s full worm moon—it’ll reach its peak during the day on Monday, March 9, so feel free to look up any time after sundown that night.

As The Old Farmer’s Almanac explains, March’s full moon is known as the “worm moon” because the ground is usually soft enough for earthworm casts (small piles of worm excrement) to start appearing on the surface, and other signs of spring soon follow. It’s also sometimes called the “full sap moon,” since March is also the time of year when sugar maples start leaking sap.

This year’s worm or sap moon is a supermoon, meaning it occurs around the time of the Moon’s perigee, or the point during the Moon’s monthly orbit when it’s closest to Earth. Because March’s full moon is especially close to Earth, it’ll look slightly bigger and brighter than a regular full moon. It won’t technically be 2020’s biggest and brightest—according to EarthSky,

This. Is cool.

Solar-powered floating farms that can produce 20 tons of vegetables every day This next design is an innovative and new approach to traditional farming. It is an amazing solar powered floating island which is covered with several farms and was created by Forward Thinking Architecture. The floating islands work in a very energy efficient way, harvesting sunlight and rainwater,...

This Superyacht Produces Hydrogen from Seawater as it Sails

This Superyacht Produces Hydrogen From Seawater As It Sails The worlds first self-sufficient sea vessel, Energy Observer, is due to leave her home port of Saint-Malo in Brittany, France, over the next few days on the first leg of a global voyage to test and promote renewable energy technologies. This isnt just any yacht though, it uses nothing but…

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Solar-Powered Barges Scoop Up 50 Tons of Plastic Waste Per Day

The ‘Interceptor” stops ocean plastic at its source, rivers.

The teenage Dutch inventor behind the Ocean Cleanup has invented a solar-powered barge to intercept plastic pollution before it reaches the ocean.

The “Interceptor” is a floating robot the size of a large houseboat that skims plastic waste off the surface of the river as it flows downstream.

It’s capable of collecting 50 tons of plastic rubbish per day. The plastic is directed up the mouth of the barge, collected in dumpsters, then sent to recycling facilities.

The nonprofit The Ocean Cleanup, has been quietly developing the system over the last four years, while it continued to work on its main project—a device that captures plastic trash already in the ocean.

A huge chunk of ocean plastic (2 million tons a year) enters the sea through rivers.

Around 1% of the world’s rivers are responsible for the majority of the trash entering the ocean, and most of those are in Asia, near cities with inadequate recycling infrastructure.

Ultimately, “we need to move all the way upstream and reduce consumption and production of single-use, unnecessary plastics, and we need to better collect and recycle plastics and ensure materials are getting back into the supply chain for a circular economy,” Nick Mallos of The Ocean Conservancy tells Fast Company.

In the meantime, it’s far more efficient to stem the tide of plastic pollution in the rivers rather than trying to tackle it in the middle of the ocean, he says.

Last fall, an Interceptor was put to the test in a heavily polluted Malaysian river with impressive results.

“The Klang river was like a floating landfill,” a representative of the Malaysian government told Phys.org.

“Boats could not pass through, and there was a lot of plastic. Now you can see the river is generally free from floating debris.”

On a typical day, the device extracts about 50 tons of plastic waste, depending on the currents, tides, and how much plastic is in a given river, The Ocean Cleanup estimates it could theoretically collect as much as 100 tons per day.

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“Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth will find resources of strength that will endure as long as life lasts”. - Rachel Carsen