The Plastic Odyssey set sail this month on a 40,000 nautical mile expedition to address what is arguably the biggest problem in the world’s oceans: plastic pollution. And with plastic debris recently observed even in the deepest part of the Mariana Trench, and an estimated 20 tonnes of the stuff flung into the world’s oceans and waterways every minute, the crisis could hardly be more acute.
The chief executive and co-founder of the project, 31-year-old Frenchman Simon Bernard, says the Plastic Odyssey mission has been four years in the planning and will include 30 stopovers. “There are two different actions,” he says. “The first one is educational, to reduce the consumption of plastic [but] the core of the expedition is really to incubate.
“At each stopover we will find 10 entrepreneurs who want to set up a recycling factory, train them on the machine we provide … and connect them with local investors, potential customers and partners. That’s the main goal of the expedition: to get those 300 entrepreneurs who at the end of the journey will be able to set up their own micro-factories to recycle plastic, and to make a living from that.”
These micro-factories are as simple as possible in design and operation, have been made to fit into a shipping container and are entirely open source (like all technology connected to the project). These factors help keep costs down and make things easier to repair locally. The micro-factories will be mass-produced from next year and Bernard says they should generate thousands of jobs as well as diverting materials that might otherwise go into the sea and eventually break down into unrecoverable microparticles.