These robot boats are cleaning up Asia’s waterways

Hong Kong CNN —

In between the speedboats, luxury yachts, and wooden fishing boats moored in a Hong Kong marina, a different kind of vessel maneuvers. It looks unassuming, but as the three-meter-long (10-foot-long) uncrewed catamaran moves deftly through the water, it consumes waste floating on the surface in a Pac-Man-like fashion.

Discarded plastic water bottles, juice boxes and cartons travel through a gap in the front of the boat and move up a conveyor belt. A camera photographs the haul, before the garbage is deposited in a collection basket in the center of the boat.

An estimated 33 billion pounds (15 billion kilograms) of plastic trash enter the oceans every year – the equivalent of dumping two garbage trucks worth of waste into the ocean every minute – according to the US nonprofit Oceana. Most of it gets there via rivers and coastlines.

“We have garbage trucks for the land. Why don’t we have something to clean the water?” Sidhant Gupta, the co-founder of the marine-tech startup Clearbot, which developed the boat, told CNN.

Clearbot is trying to change that with its autonomous, solar-powered boats, like the one in Hong Kong which can gobble up 80 kilograms (176 pounds) of waste an hour and carry 200 kilograms (441 pounds) on board.

In the process, it hopes to help the marine industry, which relies heavily on manpower and fossil fuels, evolve. “We’re building the future of boats and ships,” said Gupta.

Clearbot’s garbage-collecting boat tidies up a marina in Hong Kong.

Decarbonizing “dull, dirty or dangerous” work

Clearbot, which started as a university project, was founded in 2020. Despite Covid-19 shutdowns and a difficult fundraising environment, it’s evolving quickly. Today, it is operating about a