Cleaning our oceans- a big plan for a big problem

What do you think when you take a look at these two images? Do you see any connection?

Maybe, maybe not. We will talk about it later. Now look at this picture.

My dad keeps watching a lot of movies of this man, and he has his own version of a very famous dialogue from one of his movies: “There are two kinds of people in the world.

The ones who create problems and the ones who solve them.” I want to be in the latter category.

Now, let me tell you what I really want to do, besides showing simple correlational pictures. I want to solve a problem, a very big problem.

A 5-trillion-piece problem that’s plaguing us today: the problem of what we throw into our oceans.

Did you know by 2050 we will have the same, or maybe more, plastic in the ocean than fish?

Or if we were to take all the plastic on the ocean surface and pile it up. do you know how far a distance it would cover?

Take a guess. It would be enough to stack two-liter bottles from here to the moon and back twice. That’s one long walk.

To put into perspective the ocean pollution, as you can imagine, is a very, very big problem. While these statistics are huge and mind-boggling, what really moved me was the impact that this waste has on life.

I learned something about whales recently. Only July 2013, this young whale ended up on the shores of Northern Netherlands.

The people were very surprised to find an unusually bloated stomach. When they opened it up, they found, among other things, two horse pipes, nine-meter rope, and 37 pounds of plastic.

It’s cause of death? Intestinal blockage. What emotions run within you when you see this helpless seal entangled within this net?

Anger, pain, or perhaps even shame? There are many more horrifying pictures i have seen, which I found extremely disturbing.

Every time I see people eating fish, I feel that we’re not just feeding plastic to fish, we are feeding it to ourselves as well.

The plastic we dispose, which ends up in the ocean, gets consumed by small organisms which are later eaten by bigger fish, which might just be the fish that ends up on our plate.

Talk about the vicious karmic cycle. All this while we are trying to find water and life on other planets, and I think and smile.

If we cannot do justice to life and water on our planet, what are we trying to achieve by searching it outside our Earth?

With so much happening around us, it got a bit depressing and overwhelming for me that I felt I had to do something about it.

Hence, I came up with an idea of an invention that could help make the oceans a cleaner place: an ocean cleaner called ERVIS.

Now getting back to the two pictures we saw in the beginning. Garbage plus the sink equals to ERVIS. So what is ERVIS all about?

ERVIS is an intelligent ship which sucks waste from the surface of the ocean and cleans it. It all started last year when I saw some documentaries on water pollution and how it is plaguing us.

I also happened to see Boyan Slat’s TED Talk on the same problem and how he wanted to tackle it.

Then one day, as I came home from playing football, my mom asked me to wash my hands.

And as I went to the sink to get the dirt off, I saw how the water flowed into the sink hole and an idea came to my mind and I smiled.

As I saw the swirl of the water whirlpooling down the drain, I figured I could use the same concept to suck in waste from the surface of the water and store it in a chamber.

So I rushed to the bathtub, filled it with water and my toys, opened the nozzle, and was delighted to see a whirlpool being created which started to suck in the water and toys in the tub and I immediately knew what I had to do.

And so I went to my room, drew a rough model, a circular ship with saucers attached, a very futuristic design, much like the USS Enterprise from Star Trek - we all loved the series, right?

So I zoomed around the house, scrambled and collected the following: an inflatable tube, straws, connection pipes, scissors, some cardboard to make the saucers, and voila!

ERVIS Version 1 was born. This was just the first draft. The propellers weren’t automated and it only lasted seven seconds in water before coming apart, but there it was, my ERVIS, my vision of changing the oceans.

I then got a little more serious, did some exhaustive research, and realized that a circular shape was not very efficient, so I redesigned it to be more stretched with curves.

I worked with a 3D designer to make the new design and model of ERVIS. Another interesting fact I came across during my research was that large ships like the one you see in the picture are actually one of the biggest pollutants on Earth.

They use high-sulfur fuel, which creates a lot of air pollution. I wanted to make sure ERVIS didn’t become part of that problem, so I looked at renewable energy, like solar and wind, and cleaner ones like hydrogen and RNG.

I investigated into using lighter materials, like graphene, which is as durable as steel, and making it autonomous, like Tesla.

I eventually want to see multiple ERVISes manning the ocean, cleaning and scavenging the waste. So, what do I want ERVIS to do?

As I was doing my research, going through a variety of resources, and after guzzling down innumerable cups of hot chocolate- hey, I’m still a kid, no coffee for me- I realized part of the problem was that we actually don’t know a lot about the waste that pollutes our oceans, and so I started zeroing down on the following things I really want ERVIS to do: the first, to clean the current waste floating in the ocean, second, to analyze the data from the waste which we collect, and the third, stopped at source, which is getting disposed by the ships.

So here’s how it works. The ship is essentially a large boat with various compartments and saucers surrounding it.

The working of waste collection is based on some basic physics concepts, like saucers which rotate to capture waste, a multi-stage cleaner which is a size-based separation, and a compactor to compact the trash.

The saucers float on the surface gravitate to create a whirlpool to pull the waste towards its center.

These saucers will have a central outlet which will swallow the waste and is connected through a tube to various chambers in the ship.

Imagine a gigantic vacuum cleaner with many cleaning tubes attached to many dust bags. Once the waste enters the tube, we’ll have various stages, which will then segregate it.

First, we have an infrared sensor, which alerts ERVIS for marine life. The waste then goes to various chambers for processing.

The first chamber is the oil chamber, which collects waste oil. The second, third, fourth, and fifth chambers are for large, medium, small and micro-waste respectively.

Once the waste enters those chambers, we analyze, segregate, and compact it, and pump the filtered water back into the oceans.

Beyond ERVIS, I see myself tackling other ocean problems, like the waste which lies at the bottom of the sea, and the waste which lies on beaches.

I would like to do more research on how I can help effectively dispose of the waste - maybe process it on the ship itself- or creating different storage stations at the oceans for holding the waste.

Collector ships can bring the waste there and transport ships can take them back to land. Someone asked me how confident I was about the success of ERVIS.

As Chris Anderson wonderfully put it, this idea exists and will always remain a part of me, and nobody can take that away.

Before I end, I want this to be a new beginning of hope that one day I will see my creation in action, going there, cleaning the oceans, and restoring the natural habitat of our marine world.

Thank you.