Good News: 90 per cent of plastic in oceans could be gone by 2040 and a breakthrough for Alzheimer's

Here is the good news for today: around 90 per cent of the plastic in our oceans could be gone by 2040 thanks to new technology from The Ocean Cleanup project; hibernating bears could hold a clue to better treatment of diabetes; there’s been a ‘historic moment’ in the fight against Alzheimer’s, after the success of an experimental drug; the Ecuadorian team fighting food waste, and the maiden flight of an all-electric plane.

Click the video above to get the full digest and find out more on the following:

1. Around 90 per cent of the plastic in our oceans could be gone by 2040

The pioneering technology of The Ocean Cleanup, a Dutch project developing systems to clean up the floating plastic from the oceans, could remove 90 per cent of this plastic by 2040, says the company.

The project was founded by Boyan Slate when he was just 16 years old.

The latest generation of the team’s technology, System 03, will allow them to clean the entire Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a collection of marine debris in the North Pacific that is three times the size of France and contains up to 100 million kilos of plastic waste. They have already removed more than 100,000kg.

“Our projections show that deploying ten systems based on System 03 will allow us to clean up the entire Great Pacific Garbage Patch for good – bringing us closer to completing our mission of ridding the oceans of plastic,” the team said in a statement.

The Ocean Cleanup has also developed a clever solution to the source problem of marine plastic.

A thousand rivers are responsible for roughly 80 per cent of the world's plastic pollution, so they have developed the world's first scalable river plastics collector, a transportable solar-powered and fully autonomous vessel that can