Creator Of Floating Garbage-Collector Struggling To Capture Plastic In Pacific
A young innovator wants to remove all the plastic from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. But his invention — a long floating boom — is moving too slowly to hold the trash it collects.
A crew of engineers in the middle of the ocean will try to fix a device that was intended to clean the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, where an estimated 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic have coalesced into a field of debris twice the size of Texas.
The garbage-catcher has been floating in the Pacific since its highly-anticipated launch out of San Francisco in September, but it has yet to produce the results anticipated.
Its inventor, 24-year-old the solar-powered barrier hasn't collected any loads of trash because it's moving more slowly than the plastic it's trying to capture.
