Students invent plastic debris capturing device

Understanding that every single person has to play a part in protecting the planet, year-one students from the School of Engineering, Monash University Malaysia, designed a parabolic floater to collect floating plastic debris on the surface of oceans and rivers, inspired by Dutch inventor and entrepreneur Boyan Slat's invention and buildings designed to withstand tornadoes. The students kickstarted this project under the Leadership and Innovation unit, offered under Common Engineering for first-year engineering students. In this project, the students demonstrated the ability to benchmark for solutions in domains that are beyond the existing plastic debris solutions. Cleaning up plastic waste in the oceans and rivers is incredibly costly. With this in mind, the team designed the Ocean Parabolic Cleaner using significantly less expensive materials hoping that the design could be scaled to a much larger size to suit the demands of plastic debris retention.