The recently launched Ocean Cleanup may be effective, but it probably won’t be cleaning the estimated 8 million metric tons of plastics that enter our ocean each year with such style. Because you can’t get much more stylish than doing something on a yacht.
One would guess Richard W. Roberts and Simon White know this since they founded and launched TheYachtMarket, a business that serves yacht brokers and private sellers of every kind of boat from sailing dinghies to multi-million dollar luxury yachts. Their latest endeavor, though, doesn’t include the kind of yacht you’d expect to see in a rap music video. It’s called Ocean Saviour, a self-powering 70-meter tri-deck clean-up vessel they claim will be able to collect five tons of plastic from the ocean in a day. To top it off, the “self-powering” actually includes using the trash itself to fuel the vessel.
“It’s staggering to think that there is currently over five trillion pieces of plastic in the ocean which is having a huge detrimental impact on our ecosystem and the ocean’s biodiversity,” says Richard W. Roberts, CEO and co-founder of TheYachtMarket and Ocean Saviour. “It’s essential that we remove plastic before it breaks down into microplastics and, through Ocean Saviour, we aim to eradicate the ocean of this problem.”
If it sounds like a hair-brained idea an elementary school student hatched on hopes and dreams, the truth is they actually plan to implement a system employed by the U.S. Navy onboard the U.S.S. Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier. Created by a company called PyroGenesis, it will feature a collection system that’s called a Manta Collector Array that extends out to the sides of the boat to collect floating plastic. As the plastics are fed into an onboard conveyor, they’re next broken down with a “plasma gasification facility” that somehow turns it all into fuel for the boat. It will also have solar power panels and small wind generators for power.
And just to make sure the whole yacht concept has been fully rounded out on this one, it’s equipped with a helipad on the roof.
