Antarctic researchers are now using timber buoys over plastic, with the Tasmanian-based Australian Wooden Boat Centre doing its part to solve the plastic problem in oceans. Speaking to ABC Tasmania, Cody Horgan and Jack Witte describe how the buoys were made and tested:
“Companies are trying to become more environmentally friendly nowadays and reduce how much plastic is thrown out at sea,” Mr Horgan, manager of the Boat Centre, told broadcaster Joel Rheinberger.
“With the wood, it should break down over a period of years.”
Cody Horgan, Australian Wooden Boat Centre manager on the value of timber-based buoys.
Dubbed a “floating ball of wood,” the boat builders were engaged by a French research group—with a long and proud history of Antarctic research and exploration—to collect data at sea and transmit it to satellites in space.
Wood Central understands that the type of wood used, sequoia, will last 10 years in the wild—far beyond the 2-year lifespan of the buoys, which, according to Mr Horgan, is just treated radiated pine. “But it will break down eventually, which means there’s less muck in the water,” Mr Horgan said before adding that the manufacturing process was seamless, fitting in with what was needed by the research team:
“We’ve got a very small lathe, and I had to ensure that whatever we produced, we could finish neatly. So, with the ball, we’ve created it in such a way that it’s like segments of an orange. Essentially, before we glue it all together, we ensure the pieces are finished with their shape. So there’s minimal finishing at the end of it all.”
The buoys themselves are hollow. Once they get out to sea—expected in the next few weeks—they will be kitted out with $2,000 worth of electrical hardware. On a daily basis, they will send a ping to satellites to provide global positioning and sea surface temperatures. According to Mr Witte, an emerging shipwright working on the buoys, the material is “high-grade pine that machine well works well and is easy to use” and is made “like a mini boat, a time capsule of sorts.”
Held together with four big bolts – “two halves bolted together with a cork gasket so that when squeezed together under compression, it’s fully waterproof,” Mr Witte said, “after its life, it’ll just break down and disperse with no add-on effects into the environment.”
Constructed in 16 segments: “You do the first set of segments, glue that together so you get the main frame, and then you glue all the other segments into shape, cutting them roughly to the diameter,” Mr Witte said, “once glued together, we turn them up in the lathe to become a nice ball.”
“It’d be a good 10-pin bowling ball. It’s a bit bigger. But then we cut them in half and make them so that we can seal them and make them so they float and hold their items without flooding inside.”
As for the future, Mr Horgan said that it is highly likely that the biodegradable “smart buoys” will be floating around the world’s fifth largest continent long after their life as research buoys. “I kind of hope so. It’s a bit of the wooden boat centre floating around Antarctica. It’s not where our products usually go.”
