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![expander_maker id=”3″ more=”Read Stuff” less=”Less Stuff”]Just search “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” if you have questions. Although it’s been there a while, we are just beginning to clean it up. There have been a couple of spectacularly-funded ocean cleanup projects which were also spectacular failures if you compare the amount of money spent to the amount of trash collected.[/expander_maker]

We don’t have any workable ways to clean up our oceans. Yet.

Here’s our solution:

The first part of our ocean cleanup solution is The Trash Collector. This is an 18-foot-long autonomous vessel powered entirely by renewable energy (sails!) with proprietary trash-catching technology that sweeps the ocean automatically, picking up all the trash within a couple of feet of the surface, in a swath ten feet wide. But a Trash Collector by itself wouldn’t be much good if it had to sail the thousands of miles back to shore each time it had filled up its 400-lb capacity “trash can”; it simply wouldn’t be an economical use of its time and resources. So we also have Garbage Cans!

This is an 18-foot-long autonomous vessel powered entirely by renewable energy (sails!) with proprietary trash-catching technology that sweeps the ocean automatically, picking up all the trash within a couple of feet of the surface, in a swath ten feet wide. But a Trash Collector by itself wouldn’t be much good if it had to sail the thousands of miles back to shore each time it had filled up its 400-lb capacity “trash can”; it simply wouldn’t be an economical use of its time and resources. So we also have Garbage Cans!

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.