Floating Horizon & Marine Litter at plastics fair, K-Fair duesseldorf

Saturday and Sunday I had the honor to present project Floating Horizon at the world largest plastics fair which is called K (Kunststoffe) in Duesseldorf Germany.

I presented the findings from the conceptional first vision which I did in 2010, the cost estimation and the conclusion that there are too many unknowns and risks right now to propagate a large ocean clean up by robotic vessels (still working on getting the message to the point). Prevention is the key driver to reduce the amount of new litter reaching the oceans. In addition and particularly based on all the discussions, insights and work I will try to proceed in the development of a robotic filtration vessel but with the aim to evaluate solutions for efficient ways to take particle samples out of the water. The reason is that monitoring is an important element to observe achievements linked to the implementation of the MSFD (PDF of the Marine Strategy Framework Directive). To my today's knowledge, a robotic vessel could lower the cost of monitoring and lowers the resource footprint and impact to environment by much less fuel consumption.

After the presentation I had the great honor to speak with Mr. ZeroNaut John Elkington.

The presentation and the topic Marine Litter was well accepted by the audience. And I am very happy to experience that people are curious to know more about Marine Litter as an issue and to discuss the issue of littering, waste management and recycling and how to drive change. Already much has changed and awareness is quite high now. I am looking forward with confidence even if lots of work is ahead.

The presentation was recorded at the Bayer MaterialScience booth,