In a stunning act of corporate responsibility, one of the world’s largest makers of smartphone cases has designed and built a seaborne drone carrier designed to clean up ocean-bound plastic waste.
Already deployed off the coast of Taiwan, the Circular Blue looks a little like an offshore oil or gas platform, but rather than pulling hydrocarbons out of the seabed, its aquatic drone collects plastic floating by.
According to a release from parent company RHINOSHIELD, the pair of AI-driven drones identify pollution hotspots in real time along coastlines before directing solar-powered collection vessels to the highest-impact areas, while onboard filtration captures debris of all sizes.
It took the company 18 months to design and develop and around $2 million to build. An aerial drone launches from the platform to identify floating waste and feed its position to a floating drone which collect it.
Facilities onboard can also accommodate marine research programs, and there are living areas for 4 crewmembers, although the platform doesn’t need any human to operate it.
“I look into ocean plastic a lot, and I realize that not a lot of people are collecting it,” said Eric Wang, the CEO of RHINOSHIELD.
Passionate about recycling, the company under Wang’s leadership has doubled down on monomaterial cases, that is, one single plastic polymer from the flexible interior to the rigid exterior, to make them as easy to recycle as a plastic bottle.
“Every year we make about 5 million phone cases, and if everything is made of one material, and everything can be identified, there would be so much less waste in the world,” he said in a video.
Company sources told GNN that a North American expansion of the Circular Blue is expected in the future.
WATCH Eric explain his vision below…
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