Southampton students win design challenge to remove plastic from the ocean

How we deal with the seemingly endless tide of discarded plastics within our environment and in particular our oceans is an immediate challenge and was the focus of a biennial competition organised by the Western Joint Branch of IMarEST and RINA.

The subject for each challenge is aimed to be linked to relevant challenges and issues being reported in the media at the time, with the requirement for this year being to design a system capable of removing items of macro plastic from the oceans. 

Several teams of current Ship Science students participated in the competition with the Southampton teams being placed first and second with the top 3 positions only separated by 4 points (out of a maximum of 500). The overall winners, Diogo Figuiera Nunes, Alex Pardoe and Tom Kenwright, impressed the judges with their design Oceanum Nova, a repurposed catamaran dive support vessel collecting debris caught by floating barricades. The concept covered the design brief in impressive detail while also showing how it could be used in multiple different scenarios and locations. The USP of their design was the fact that it brought together many different designs that have already been tried and tested and were therefore confident that they would work.

Teams were made up of between 2 and 6 members and were required to produce their solution between mid-September and the finals night at the start of December. Competing teams spanned both students in further education and those in employment. The challenge was judged based on the production of a poster along with a 10 minute presentation and 5 minutes of questioning from a select panel of judges. The judges covered a range of appropriate areas with representatives from the National Oceanographic Centre, the Environment Agency, Houlder, Babcock and the IMarEST.