In 2019, Clearbot, a company whose automatic robo-boats are doing the dirty, dirty job of cleaning the ocean trash that is happening with manned, diesel boats around the world as of now, was born.
Clearbot has been using 13 special boats in Hong Kong and India to clean up plastic waste. These boats can collect up to 250kg of plastic every day. They move on their own and use electricity to power themselves. They pick up the plastic from the water and put it in specific places so it can be collected and recycled.
India has a lot of plastic in the oceans – about 13 out of every 100 pieces of plastic in the whole world come from India.
Clearbot did a pilot project in September in the northeast Indian city of Shillong, showcasing its ability to collect 600kg to 700kg of waste from a lake there in the space of three days. It also has a project in Bengaluru in southern India. Most of company’s growth is expected to come from India as there is sufficient demand.
Clearbot produces absolutely no carbon emissions, because it uses solar energy to power its fleet of electric boats, rather than diesel and they rent out these boats thus providing “robots as a service.” The tech start-up is set to launch a new generation of bigger solar-powered autonomous boats to boost its efforts to clean up polluted waters in India.
Clearbot’s latest fleet of self-driving electric boats will each have the capacity to pick up around 500kg of plastic waste and other rubbish from the ocean when they are expected to be deployed in March. That is double the capacity of each of the company’s current water-borne robotic cleaners operating in the seas and lakes of India.
Every year, a very large amount of plastic goes into the oceans. It’s like a big truck dumping plastic into the sea every minute. This is really bad for the animals and plants that live in the ocean, and also for people.
The oceans are important because they help to control climate change by absorbing around a quarter of all greenhouse gas emissions, and capture 90 per cent of the excess heat generated by those emissions.
Reference- Clearbot website, South China Morning Post story, Interesting Engineering, Futurism