A vacuum cleaner to save the ocean

by Annalisa Audino



How many of you know that the great oil stain of the British Petroleum there is not alone to wonder aimlessly for our oceans? You must say the truth. Not many, isn't it? Well, there is also a great deal of plastics that has been floating by now for years and it seems not to want to stop growing.

To make an example there are real plastic islands both in the Atlantic Ocean and in the Pacific. Kara Lavender Law, an English researcher, has discovered the island of the Atlantic, after 20 years of studies effected with a team of scientists of the Sea Education Association, and individualized the anxious island to wide of the coasts in Miami. But in the last decades numerous researches effected over 6000 "wisecracks of fishing" in the area of the Caribbean to analyze the plastic residues.

«We have found a region in which the fragments seem to focus and to persist for long time - the researcher has explained to the Bbc - more than him 80% of the plastics that we have accumulated come from the zone between the 22 and the 38 degrees north of latitude».

The density of the plastics, in the zone, it is of 200 thousands fragments for square kilometer, the same in relief in its "Pacific Garbage patch", great area as the Texas where they accumulate plastic refusals coming from the whole world, situated in the North of the Pacific.

The studies continue unstoppable, also to understand how to quickly face the problem. The afloat plastic monster has been documented in different ways and, lately studied particularly by a specific scientific mission composed by 30 researchers, that for three weeks have lived on board of a ship and have observed movements and composition of the "monster." Financed by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography of the California University in San Diego, the ship has ploughed the zone of the Pacific to analyze the composition of the float of refusals, that circulates in form of wide nebula for over one hundred kilometers, continually remixed by the tides between the Hawaii and Japan, and also to study the organisms that come to contact with the stain and the impact of the same one on the ecological system.

And it's easy to imagine that the plastic pieces enter in the food chain of the sea habitats: some are so small to be invisible to naked eye and others are kept together from a gelatinous structure that according to some hypotheses it also captures as a sponge other polluting substances as pesticide and hydrocarbons. This plasticized threat stirs from South North in a band of around 1,600 km, according to the tides, the atmospheric events and the temperatures of the seas.

In short it is time to intervene, over whether to concretely be informed on what happens on our poor man planet. It is so that the Electrolux has decided to sensitize the population on the cycle of the refusals and on the necessity to treat the plastics with more attention, proposing, further to a real series of "ecological" products, also a praiseworthy initiative to use the sailing plastics as a real mine.

The denominated project Vac from the sea, introduced with a video, on the most common socials network and it not only involves numerous volunteers that will fish around the materials from the waters for the ocean Pacific, and Atlantic, the Mediterranean and the northern seas. The residues, coming from dumps of the whole world, will be treated for being recycled, stocked adequately and to become part of new appliances. And even more the interesting thing is that the appliances (particularly vacuum cleaner) gotten by the recycling of the "fished" plastics, will be different one from the other and will be distributed so that in every Country it will be possible to purchase those made with the plastics fished in the outskirts.