Hello everyone, my name is Cecilia. Today the world is celebrating Earth Day, a 54-year annual event and the largest environmental movement on our planet.Before sharing some GOOD news in favour of our ecosystem, I must thank the Thinking Watermill Society for inviting the Parioli English School to the podcast.On a positive note, we are 2 students who deeply believe in this project and would like to raise awareness as well as spread the results of some amazing initiatives as follows.Do you know that The ocean cleanup is a non-profit organisation that develops technologies to clear the oceans from plastic pollution?This year’s goal is to clean the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (or GPGP) by optimising the System 03.The GPGP is the biggest accumulation of floating plastic on Earth (triple the area of France). It is located between Hawaii and California and it contains 100.000.000 kilograms of plastic. Cleaning such a vaste area requires ten cleanup systems.Therefore, in 2023, the association tripled the size of their system so as to achieve their goal.The system 03 is long 2.5 kilometres and it is able to clean an area of ocean equivalent to a football field in 5 seconds.Until today the ocean clean up has removed a total of 345,000 kilograms of plastic, which represents only a third of a percent of the mass of plastic in the GPGP. Even though it is not a huge percentage, these results demonstrate that this system is working.They aim for System 03 to achieve 100 kg/ hour of plastic extracted from the GPGP. For example, in 2023 this system reached a level of 75kg/hours of plastic removed, an all-time high for us in the GPGP.In order to improve the performance of cleanup systems they consider both the amount of plastic they extract in kilograms per hours and the uptime the system is actively cleaning (not including transit, extraction, etc.).In conclusion, they believe that in 2024, by increasing the uptime, capture efficiency and by improving the ability to target the high plastic density areas, they will achieve their goal and show the world that their solution for Great Pacific Garbage Patch is real and effective.