Aalesund company Mørenot AS is engaged in one of the most pressing environmental problems of our age, and is now developing a 2.5-km-long ocean cleanup system with one objective: ridding the world’s oceans of plastic.

This will be done in cooperation with the Dutch non-profit organization The Ocean Cleanup. Together they have developed a prototype in 2021 that proved to be a huge success and has already collected large amounts of plastic in the Pacific Ocean. A new, improved version is now under development and Mørenot was again the chosen supplier for this important project, which has been given the name ‘System 03’.

‘With more than a century’s experience from the fisheries and aquaculture industry, it’s great that we can now use our technology and know-how to help The Ocean Cleanup develop System 03, which is three times as big as the previous system. We’re really enthusiastic about the project and are proud to be a part of it,’ says CEO of the Mørenot group Arne Birkeland.

PRECISE, GENTLE AND EFFICIENT
The cleanup system has been specially designed and tailored for this purpose. It is four meters deep and designed as a funnel with an opening at the bottom to ensure that fish and other marine life are not trapped when trawling for marine plastic. Two offshore vessels pull the net between them at a speed of 1.5 knots. The 2.5-km-long net will clean up an area the size of a football field every 15 seconds. Potentially, this means almost 6,000 football fields a day!

A GREAT RESPONSIBILITY
‘Around 1-2 million tonnes of plastic end up in the ocean each year, posing an immense threat to all marine life. As part of an industry that depends on the ocean, this project is extremely important to us, and we will always continue to challenge ourselves to do even more to protect the oceans as an important food source for future generations,’ says Mørenot’s Arne Birkeland.

Mørenot is in the process of developing System 03, and is aimed to be put in operation in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch towards the end of summer 2022.   

Mørenot

• Mørenot is a global provider of solutions and services for the global fishing, aquaculture and seismic industries, with 800 dedicated employees all over the world working in sales, service and production.
• Our goal and mission is to provide solutions that enable sustainable harvesting of marine resources.

The Ocean Cleanup

• The Ocean Cleanup is a non-profit organization that develops and scales technologies to rid the world’s oceans of plastic. 
• They aim to achieve this goal by taking a two-pronged approach: stemming the inflow via rivers and cleaning up what has already accumulated in the ocean. 
• For the latter, The Ocean Cleanup is developing large-scale systems to efficiently concentrate the plastic for periodic removal. 
• This plastic is tracked and traced through DNV’s chain of custody model to certify claims of origin when recycling it into new products. To curb the tide via rivers, The Ocean Cleanup has developed Interceptor™ Solutions to halt and extract riverine plastic before it reaches the ocean. 
• Founded in 2013 by Boyan Slat, The Ocean Cleanup now employs a broadly multi-disciplined team of approximately 100. 
• The foundation is headquartered in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.