A small company located in the Netherlands called Plastic Whale is hard at work cleaning up the pollution that clogs Amsterdam’s canals and rivers. It is mostly plastic, with half lives of a thousand years, and the company has found a fun and innovative way to clean up the environment and keep the company afloat as it were.
The crisis of plastics pollution on a massive global scale has become overwhelming and doesn’t look to improve anytime soon. The major nations of the world, especially their central governments and ruling politicians, have no interest at all in helping to clean up such things as The Great Pacific Garbage Pile.
The company organizes tours and fishing trips into the canals and everyone gets a chance to pitch in and clean up the floating plastic debris. By running these tours through the elaborate and huge canal system of Amsterdam, the company is actually preventing more junk, trash, and especially plastic, from making it to the ocean where it will likely make it to the two gigantic trash islands floating out there.
The company recycles all of the plastic to make new boats
The company wastes none of the plastic and they recycle it for further use. They wash it and shred it up to small granular consistency. It, then, turns it into more fishing boats and other products such as dishes as well as even skate boards that they call wasteboards. As much of the plastic as possible goes towards making more fishing boats and even the bottle caps are used to cover the floor surface of the fishing vessels.
Bottle caps come in handy to line the bottom of the fishing boat floors and to make their innovative Wasteboard skateboards
The company began in 2010 and has, since then, taken out tons of debris including over 50,000 plastic bottles. The company employs 20 people and the founder, Marius Smit, tells of how he has tried to re-educate people to see plastic as a reusable raw material and mentions that enough plastic is discarded every year to surround the Earth four times. He looks to grow the company all across the Netherlands and eventually into all of Europe and the rest of the world.
Since 2010, the company has recovered over 50,000 plastic bottles.
PHOTO CREDITS The Waking Times