QUITO, ECUADOR – Plastic bottles, sports balls, and what look like the wheels from a toy pram float down the San Pedro River that runs through Quito, Ecuador. They are on their way towards the Pacific Ocean, on a downstream journey repeated all over the world as plastic waste is flushed through rivers into the seas.
However, this particular patch of plastic waste is about to have its journey cut short. It is brought to a stop by a floating barrier in the water, part of a local plastic clean-up technology called the Azure system, which collects plastic from rivers.
Created by the tech start-up Ichthion, the Azure system’s simple design has the capacity to stop and collect around 80 tonnes of plastic per day. At this particular point in the San Pedro River, the most it’s collected in a day has been 1.5 tonnes of plastic and synthetic fabrics – that’s roughly the same weight as a female hippopotamus.
“What you take out of rivers, what you find along the riverbanks… the majority of this will all end up in the ocean,” says Inty Grønneberg, founder and chief executive of Ichthion, a name derived from ichthyology, the study of fish. “Our idea is to prevent ocean-bound plastic.”
Plastic pollution in the open sea is a growing concern. It can harm turtles, strangle sea lions, or be consumed by birds or fish, which could also end up in the human food chain. Scientists are also increasingly concerned that microplastics can cause irreversible toxicity within aquatic ecosystems. Research shows that up to 80% of this plastic is carried out to sea via rivers, mainly due to the mismanagement of waste on land.
But a growing number of innovators, like Grønneberg, are trying to stop this flow.
The Azure system is a boom device that stretches across the river to stop objects floating on the surface. It extends down 60cm (2ft) into the water, allowing fish and other organisms to move freely below, and is placed at an angle allowing the natural water flow to direct all debris into one corner of the riverbank.
A manual operator in the water then guides the debris onto a mobile conveyor belt that dumps the plastic into a large container on shore, where it is sorted for recycling and trash destined for landfill.
Kimberley Michelle Brown 