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Breaking! EPA finalizes plan to decontaminate Newark Bay & lower Passaic River

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After years of investigating safety issues involved with removing Agent Orange and other contaminants from the Newark Bay and lower Passaic River, the EPA has created a comprehensive plan to remove what is logistically feasible and cap the rest at the bottom of the waterway.

The plan includes:

  • 3.5 million cubic yards of contaminated sediment will be removed, bank- to-bank, by dredging the river bottom from Newark Bay to the Belleville/ Newark border.
  • This will result in the permanent removal from the river of approximately 13 pounds of highly toxic and persistent dioxin (2,3,7,8- TCDD), 24,000 pounds of mercury, 6,600 pounds of PCBs, and 1,300 pounds of DDT (a pesticide).

Here are highlights of the plan:

EPA Lower Passaic Cleanup Plan
Source: EPA

View the entire record of decision for the lower eight miles of the Passaic River.

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21 yo Boyan Slat’s historic ocean cleanup is poised to begin

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Boyan Slat tests his inventionA 21 year old inventor has designed a miles-long filter that will remove the many tons of plastic debris in our oceans … and convert it to usable products, like oil. The storm-resistant equipment will be powered by solar panels and the project will launch next year, in 2016.

Marine life will float right through the filters. Because there are no nets, “entanglement will be virtually impossible,” Slat comments. His Ocean Cleanup team proposes to eliminate about half of the ocean’s floating island of plastic.

Boyan Slat, founder and CEO of The Ocean Cleanup and a native of the Netherlands, offers this comment on the value of his project:

“Taking care of the world’s ocean garbage problem is one of the largest environmental challenges mankind faces today. Not only will this first cleanup array contribute to cleaner waters and coasts but it simultaneously is an essential step towards our goal of cleaning up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. This deployment will enable us to study the system’s efficiency and durability over time.

Watch Slat describe the journey of conceiving and designing his world-saving invention.

Like The Ocean Cleanup on Facebook

What you can do: help keep plastic out of waterways.

New solutions, Water

Protei: swimming ocean clean-up robots

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My friend Guillermo Cerceau, who is interested in the health of oceans, is excited about a new technology project called Protei, being developed under Open Hardware Standard licensing in order to help the world, instead of for profit. Protei are swimming, remote-controlled robots which can be used in the ocean to clean up garbage and chemical spills. Protei’s inventors tell us this about their oil cleaning prototype:

Current oil spill skimming technology could only collect 3% of the DeepWater Horizon Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The health of workers was exposed to cancerous toxic, the boats were expensive and pollutive to operate, they could not operate in bad weather (hurricane seaon) they could not operate at night or far away.

Protei is a technology currently in development that will provide
– Unmanned, no human exposed to toxic.
– Green and cheap, sailing upwind capturing oil downwind.
– Self-righting, rugged, can operate in hurricane time.
– Semi-autonomous : can swarm continuously and far away.

Protei exceeded their Kickstarter funding goal of $27,500 and now are working on a new prototype to clean up waste discarded in oceans.