ALAMEDA — It’s launching time for The Ocean Clean Up, the ambitious effort to collect the massive vortex of plastic drifting in the Pacific Ocean between California and Hawaii.
A nonprofit from the Netherlands, The Ocean Clean Up will use a floater attached to a screen under the water, which if all goes according to plan will concentrate the debris and allow it to be gathered and recycled.
The system will be towed from Alameda, where it has been assembled, through San Francisco Bay and under the Golden Gate Bridge starting about 11 a.m. Saturday.
The Dutch company has been working since February at the former Alameda Naval Air Station to assemble the system, which includes sections 250 feet long.
Stretching 2,000 feet, it will be the longest ocean structure ever deployed and is expected to clean 90 percent of accumulated plastic from the world’s seas by 2040, according to the company.
Once it reaches the garbage patch, an anchor will be suspended below the equipment at about 2,000 feet, making the system move with the ocean’s current slower than the debris and so easier to gather up.
Boyan Slat founded the environmental company in 2013, when he was just 18.
The “Great Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch” is the largest of five in the world’s oceans, where currents and tides cause plastic and other material to concentrate. Other spots are between Australia and Africa and off the coast of South America.
The Bay Area launch will be the company’s first, and it is taking place off what’s known as the Seaplane Lagoon at the former U.S. Navy base.
“Next to Alameda’s major historical military significance, it was here that the famous car chase scene in ‘The Matrix Reloaded’ was filmed, and it was home to some of the best experiments of my favorite childhood TV show, ‘MythBusters,’ ” Slat said in a statement shortly after the company began leasing the East Bay location. “We’re honored to be allowed to use this site as the assembly yard for the world’s first ocean cleanup system. Hopefully, we will make some history here as well.”
After the concentrated plastic is swept from the Pacific Ocean, it will be brought back to shore for recycling and then sold, with the revenue used to fund cleanup in other ocean areas.
The cost of the project was not immediately available. But the Dutch company announced in May 2017 that it had raised $31 million since 2013 to test and launch its technology.
Donors include Marc Benioff, the founder of Salesforce, and Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal.