The gargantuan mounds of plastic polluting the seas could be solved if a pilot project is successful.
A Dutch entrepreneur, Boyan Slat, who is all of 21, is set to start a pilot device off southern Japan which hopes to gather some of the millions of tonnes of plastic in the world’s oceans.
The small-scale Ocean Cleanup Array is the most ambitious to-date.
"An estimated 8 million tonnes of plastic enters the world's oceans every year, which is the equivalent volume of two Empire State Buildings every week," Mr Slat said.
Winds, waves and currents scoop up the bulk of the five trillion plastic items at sea and collect them into five enormous piles. The largest, in the North Pacific, is estimated to be anywhere between 270,000 square miles and 5.8 million square miles.
The project will use ocean currents to funnel the plastic into the centre of the V-shapes which regularly form. It will be attached to the ocean bed until the mass is large enough for it to be collected and shipped away for recycling.
Efforts to date to remove the plastic have deployed ships to criss-cross the plastic mounds. This effort is heavy in time and money.
The project will rely on obtaining revenue from the recycled plastic to cover the cost of recovery.
"There are at least 100 species threatened with extinction due to plastic pollution. The economic damage is also substantial, with the United Nations estimating that countries spend $13 billion a year on cleaning beaches and in damage to the fishing and tourism industries", Mr Slat said.
Another concern is that the chemicals in the plastic could enter the food chain after having been consumed by birds and fish.
Japan was chosen for the pilot scheme because some 30,000 cubic metres of trash hit Tsushima Island every year while a recycling plant already exists in the island to convert plastic into oil which is used as fuel on the island.
The initial trial is expected to cost "a few million dollars", Mr Slat said, while the larger version could be around $300 million to build and deploy. Financial support to date has come from philanthropists, donations and crowd-funding efforts.
There are still matters to sort out before the project begins.
"We have had issues with the engineering, with how to attach the array to the seabed, with collection efficiency, maritime law, the quality of the plastic recovered and so on," he said. "We are still working on those issues, and plenty more, but we expect to learn a lot from our Japan project".
