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Full Version: How Do you Vacuum Plastic from a Beach?
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https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-us-can...om-a-beach

Kamillo Beach in Hawaii has been called "Trash Beach" because of the large amount of small plastic trash on the beach. Engineers from Canada created a vacuum cleaner type machine called Hoola One. Because of the small size of the plastic, it's hard to separate it by hand. The machine sucks up the mixture of plastics and sand and then separates the products by buoyancy when water is added. The plastics float and the sand sinks so they are separated.  The machine can clean more than 17 kg of sand per minute. This  machine was developed for a class project at the University of Sherbrooke and was donated to collect the plastic trash on the beach. Although it will help deal with some of the issues of microplastic on this beach, the big issue is still the consumption and management of plastic and we must consider how to reduce, reuse and recycle.
I believe trash cleanup among beaches and oceans should be a big priority for our society. Every year, more than a million seas birds and over 100000 marine mammals are killed by litter. It is so sad to see so many beautiful places, especially beaches in Hawaii, become so ugly just from people who are careless with their garbage. I hope this trash vacuum will greatly help clean our beaches as it would be a shame to see even more coastlines become completely filled with litter.
I think the creation of this trash vacuum is an excellent contribution to the efforts towards saving our beaches and oceans. Although it does not seem that it will help on a worlwide scale, I believe the trash vacuum will. If everyone has that thought in their head that cleaning one beach won't do anything, then nobody will try. However, i believe if we fliip that thought and think that cleaning one beach will help, then everyone would do it. If every person contributed on a small scale, it would add up to a huge contribution.
As someone who has been to Hawaii numerous times, my first time being in 2006, it is sad to see all of the damage that has been caused to many of the island over such a short span of time. Just within a span of thirteen years I have seen a noticeable change to the coral reefs and the amount of pollution on the beaches. Reading about this article and the vacuum cleaner device that the engineers have manufactured to help aid in the removal of garbage has me optimistic about this issue.
This is a wonderful project and a great step to increasing more methods of cleaning our environment. I believe that this project will be used by many in the future and maybe it can even be modified in order to clean more than just plastic.