Engineers on Saturday set to sea to deploy a rubbish collection device to corral plastic litter floating between California and Hawaii in an attempt to clean up the world’s largest rubbish patch in the heart of the Pacific Ocean.
The 2,000-foot (600-metre) long floating boom was being towed from San Francisco, between California and Hawaii.
The system is a giant U-shaped barrier that will float in the ocean, it is expected to trap some of the 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic.
It allows a support vessel to fish out the collected plastic every few months and transport it to dry land where it will be recycled.