Sustainable Electromechanical Solution for Floating Marine Litter Collection in Calm Marinas

In the last few years, marine litter has been drawing considerable attention due to the negative effects it has on the marine environment. Water properties alteration, fish entanglement and generation of microplastics are just some of the problems marine litter causes, requiring scientific research to provide solutions to address this issue. Most of the waste that ends up in seas and oceans is actually produced by land-based activities. Therefore, one way of addressing the problem is trying to collect as much litter as possible before it goes into the open sea or sinks to the bottom. With this aim, the proposed Waste out of Water (WoW) electromechanical solution skims the surface of calm marinas (i.e. ports or lagoons) and collects floating litter such as plastic bags, cigarette butts, microplastics, hydrocarbons and oil in a container placed on the dock, where they can eventually be sorted. The proposed device builds on top of state-of-the-art devices trying to address some of their most common problems such as frequent clogging and high power consumption. The contribution of this work is to present the early-stage development of the Waste out of Water solution. The downstream filtering and the employment of the platform as a stand-alone device show promising results for future developments.