Trashfence Catches a Garbage Tsunami Heading Downriver    

Ben Munson, Unit,   202 Productions   Eric Sorensen                         Jul 28, 2022

Trash is everywhere. It’s on land, where it sometimes piles so high it becomes a smoldering mountain. It’s in space, where it breaks down differently while moving at blistering speeds and battered. And it’s in our water, which sometimes forms huge garbage waves.

The Ocean Cleanup, a nonprofit environmental engineering organization, has identified one river where the trash waves seem to be continually breaking. The group said the Rio Motagua basin in Guatemala is particularly messy, sending an estimated 20,000 tons of plastic into the Caribbean Sea annually. That means this one river is responsible for 2% of the plastic that enters the oceans worldwide.

To push back against the rush of rubbish, Ocean Cleanup has developed the eight-meter-tall Interceptor Trashfence. It looks like a significant metal volleyball net, and it’s designed to contain trash upstream before it can hit the ocean and disperse. It’s an upgraded version of the Interceptor Original, whose 10,000-kilogram capacity wouldn’t hold up long against the annual Motagua floods.

The Interceptor Trashfence uses technology standards in avalanche and landslide protection systems. With the reinforced model on the riverbed, the idea is to catch the trash and then wait for water levels to recede before moving the garbage pile with excavators.

In a video showing the Interceptor Trashfence in action earlier this year, a shocking amount of garbage rages down the Rio Motagua before the fence traps it. Unfortunately, the Trashfence eventually springs a leak because the river’s force erodes the river base below the fence. Fortunately, Ocean Cleanup engineers don’t seem discouraged.

For now, the organization is optimizing the design and figuring out just how many Trashfences it will take to keep all or most of the plastic from making it to the sea.

TRIZ Application: To clean up the ever-growing problem of plastic trash pollution in our oceans, the first step is that we need to stop the influx of plastic trash. Using TRIZ Principle # 10 Prior Action, we can perform this task by blocking the trash on rivers with an "Interceptor Trashfence." It is easier to recover this trash before it is dispersed into the ocean.