It’s certainly an ambitious mission, and the company admits there’s “no playbook,” but 4Ocean has already collected 28 million pounds of trash from plastic-polluted saltwater around the world, and its plans are just getting started.
The robot 4Ocean is providing to Florida beaches is called BeBot, and it collects cigarette butts, plastic debris, and other trash, Fox Weather reported.
While 4Ocean insists on its website that “cleaning the oceans is our business,” it’s done primarily by humans, and the company’s first foray into robotics could herald a more efficient and productive future.
This could enable autonomous boats to collect plastic and other trash from the ocean without humans, a technology that already exists but is scattered among different companies.
The European Union-funded Seaclear project aims to create the first robots to clean up trash from the ocean floor, which is a bit more technically difficult than collecting trash from the surface.
Computer gaming giant Razer has teamed up with Clearbot to design an autonomous trash-collecting ship that can identify floating trash in the water, sort it, and then collect it in a bin.
Another nonprofit called Clear Blue Sea has designed a number of innovative technologies for cleaning up the world’s oceans and waterways, including a solar-powered, semi-autonomous marine robot that collects marine plastic pollution without fossil fuels or human labor.
If you want to learn more about these technologies, you might want to read one of our previous contributions, called 5 Ways Robots Are Cleaning Up the World’s Oceans.
Back to 4Ocean. Currently, it operates on a partnership basis with local organizations. For example, the solar-powered BeBot robot responsible for cleaning Florida beaches is the result of a partnership with the nonprofit Keep Brevard Beautiful.
On its website, 4Ocean states: “BeBot is an environmentally friendly beach cleaning robot whose sole purpose is to clean and restore our coastlines while protecting the natural environment, and it can remove plastic waste and other debris by mechanically sifting sand without harming the local environment.”
However, 4Ocean has participated in cleanup projects around the world and is promoting the concept of “plastic neutral” companies and products, where businesses can calculate and offset their “plastic footprint” by recycling trash from oceans, rivers, and coastlines around the world.
It also raises funds by selling certificates and credits that allow companies to compensate for the plastic emitted into the environment by their activities.
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