While enjoying a coffee during a work break at a dockside cafe in South Africa, Richard Hardiman was struck by the inefficiency of how the port was being cleaned. The University Of Cape Town School of Business Graduate witnessed two guys in a small boat scooping piles of floating trash with a basic pool net. With a background in technology, his mind naturally went to the thought that there has to be some device that can clean up the trash better than two guys slowly fumbling about with a pool net. Assuming that modern port cities like LA or London would have a more efficient answer, Richard jumped into an internet rabbit hole.

While researching trash in the ocean online, he learned some startling truths. The first thing he learned greatly annoyed him. It was that the pool net method was the standard way of cleaning harbor debris. Then Richard was faced with the staggering facts about just how much trash finds its way into the oceans. Each year more than 8million tons of plastic waste is dumped into ports, harbors, marinas, and shores. This trash gets washed out into the oceans over time. The waste is then eaten by marine wildlife that mistakes the trash as edible. The fish ingesting this toxic waste is ending up in the fish that we eat as well. Aside from marine animals becoming sick and dying from the trash in the ocean, it is also impacting human health. Richard realized that he had to find a better way of solving the problem to protect the oceans and make the job easier.

While Richard had a degree in business with a background in technology, he was in no way an engineer. So, he sought help from RDM Rotterdam, a technology engineering think tank built in a former shipyard in the Netherlands. In 2018, Richard founded RanMarine Technology out of RDM. With the geniuses at RDM, Richard developed the WasteShark, a drone that collects trash up to 1ft below and along the water surface. The drone is modeled to mimic how a whale shark cruises through the ocean, swallowing plankton with its wide open mouth. The WasteShark is rectangular like a catamaran with an open space underneath. The open space is bracketed with a mesh grid, that as the drone cruises, traps any trash, much like how a whale shark filters its food.

The WasteShark weighs about 158lbs, is 5ft long, 3.5ft wide, and just under 2ft tall. It operates on a rechargeable battery so that it has a zero carbon footprint. Each battery can sustain an 8 hour long mission while cruising at just under 2mph. If the drone were to travel any faster, it would scatter rather than collect waste. The WasteShark is easy to operate with a remote controller so that anyone can maneuver it, something that was critical to Richard to ensure that the drone would create more jobs. Instead of painstakingly collecting harbor trash with a pool net, the same two workers could easily use the drone to collect up to 200 liters of debris per deployment. There is also an option to autonomously program the drone to work in a designated area with LiDAR anti collision and GPS to navigate around buoys, docks, and other water vessels.

WasteShark doesn’t only clean up trash found in port environments. With a special filter, the drone can remove toxins from the water surface like algae blooms or oil spills. However, detecting chemical surface pollutants like oil spills is not easy to do when at the same level as the water surface. Recently the WasteShark has entered a trial program using an aerial drone to tackle harder to spot water surface debris. Using the data processing system developed by Kinetica, aerial drones collect images of the water surface. An algorithm then deciphers what type of debris (plastics, cigarette butts, chemicals, etc.) is on the surface. The WasteShark drone can then be deployed with the appropriate filter. Meanwhile, the entire time the drone is busy cleaning up the water surface, it also is collecting an array of data with sensors. These sensors will give scientists valuable information on water temperatures, depth, salinity, and chemical composition.

When Richard first began thinking of using a drone to clean up harbors, it was for arrogant, selfish reasons. He simply assumed that he could come up with a better system than ineffective pool nets. Through his research and working with the engineers at RDM, Richard became what he proudly calls an “accidental environmentalist”. In a TED talk presentation about how he came to be the CEO of RanMarine and the visionary of WasteShark he quotes the late marine conservationist Jacques-Yves Cousteau who said, “People protect what they love.” Through this process, Richard developed a deep love for the ocean. “As an accidental environmentalist,” Richard addressed the TED Talk audience, “I now truly believe that our oceans needed [sic] to be protected. And I would like to impart that and hopefully [sic] that you love the ocean too, and would like to help protect it in some small way.” The WasteShark drone is how Richard is working to protect the oceans of the world.