Tour of Circular Explorer Vessel

Tour of Circular Explorer vessel, marine debris cleanup. A catamaran anchored at Manila Bay, Philippines and serving as a research vessel – a 100% solar-powered recycling catamaran, designed to recover marine plastic waste.

The Circular Explorer is building awareness through educational activities to empower next-generation changemakers in the local communities and pushing the boundaries of marine science to explore new solutions with leading marine institutes.

Due to the many poor communities living along various river banks, there are lots of plastics discarded into the rivers. Although there are efforts to clean up, the work is never ending.
We had a good opportunity to see the vessel upfront and learn about its important work, not just to collect but to see how AI is helping to analyse the varieties of debris including really small items. As the AI gets further training, the analysis will become better.

The vessel was made in Germany and has a solar panel array as its roof. The unique feature is that the entire roof assembly can rotate and solar panels angles can be changed to give the best facing to the sun.

Having been in the marine industry, I paid particular attention to the aluminum structural works, battery systems, bilge pumping system and of course the overall floatation and engineering.

Kudos the German engineers and team who designed and built the vessel.

Link for Circular Explorer: https://www.holcim.com/sustainability/circular-economy/circular-explorer