Our Ocean Trash Collector!

(Below) Two of our founders sailing the prototype for our autonomous ocean cleanup vessel “The Trash Collector” in Kawaihae Harbor, Big Island of Hawaii.

Here’s the problem:

There’s a LOT of our shore-side junk floating around in the ocean! Read More

Here’s our solution: our autonomous vessels,the 18-foot Trash Collector, the 60-foot Garbage Can, and the 250-foot to 450-foot long Dumpster do the job.

The first part of our ocean cleanup solution is The Trash Collector. Read More

Garbage Cans are 60-foot long semi-autonomous sailing vessels with a 15-ton trash capacity, that unload the Trash Collectors so they can go back out and sweep the ocean for another 400 pounds of trash. Each Garbage Can works with six to ten Trash Collectors, who sail over to the Garbage Can every time they get full, and unload into it. As the Trash Collectors and their Garbage Can clean an area of the ocean and find that their “harvests” are decreasing, they can all be moved (using a remote shoreside operator’s laptop) to a new area that satellite data has identified as having plenty of trash.

But a Garbage Can by itself wouldn’t be much use if it had to sail the thousands of miles back to shore to unload, each time it had filled up its 15-ton capacity hold. It simply wouldn’t be an economical use of its time and resources. So we also have Dumpsters!

A Dumpster is a 250-foot-long to 450-foot-long semi-autonomous sailing ship with a cargo capacity in the hundreds of tons, that unloads the trash from the Garbage Cans and when full, sails itself to a shore unloading station. Meanwhile, a different Dumpster is on its way out to take over and shepherd the Garbage Cans and Trash Collectors. Each Dumpster can take care of five or six Garbage Cans, which in turn each shepherd six to ten Trash Collectors, so that one Dumpster is receiving the trash from thirty to sixty active trash collection vessels.

The Dumpsters operate with a human crew of two to three people, whose responsibilities are to maintain smooth operations of the smaller vessels as well as do maintenance and repairs on them. If a Garbage Can or Trash Collector gets damaged beyond the ability of the Dumpster crew to repair, say by being run down by a ship, then the Dumpster can take it back to shore for repair on its regular voyages to unload the trash. Because the Dumpsters have a nearly unlimited source of electrical power from their “hydro-generators” (which are water-powered electrical turbines driven by  the force of the vessel moving through the water), they will also be able to do simple compacting and the first steps of recycling the collected trash while sailing on their 4-to-9-day return voyages to shore to unload.

Our Prototype For The Trash Collector Sailing:

If you have questions, I’ll be happy to answer them (808-640-1981). If you know someone who wants to help us build The Ocean Cleanup Crew, please forward this.

With Warm Aloha, Tim and the Hawaiian Ocean Technologies, Inc., family: Susanne, Jack, Lucky, and Rose

PS: Want to invest and help us build this clean-oceans future? Email me at skipper@oceanpeopleSPAM.org (take out the SPAM!) I’ll email you an NDA to execute, after which I can email you back a complete exposition on our Ocean Cleanup Crew, including the proprietary technology for this industry which we’ve developed.