Pune: City-based Haaziq Kazi (12) has built the prototype of a ship for cleaning up the oceans on the planet. His innovation was recognised by TED-Ed and he was invited to give a TED talk, which he delivered in December 2018.
It all began after Haaziq watched a documentary film regarding plastic pollution in oceans and its threat to fishes and other aquatic species. “I was very pained when I was researching about oceans for our school project. I was stunned and could not believe my eyes that huge amount of plastic is floating in the oceans and because of which many fishes and birds are dying. I believe ignorance is the biggest threat to our planet today,” said Haaziq.
A student of Indus International School, he came up with the idea of building a ship after being assigned a project from his school. TED-Ed, which is a TED’s youth and education initiative, was associated with the school and had given the students a project to work on anything or to do anything under the sun. “TED-Ed showed us documentaries on air and water pollution and others, but my interest was stuck on to marine pollution. I started drawing random designs of ships which had a net to collect the plastic pollution from the oceans. After several such drawings I decided to make a demo project model. My family members helped make the demo model by using scrap materials. The model was then presented in the school and they gave it to TED-Ed,” Haaziq recalled.
The boy got inspired by a TEDx talk delivered in 2012 by Boyan Slat who was just 18 years old then and spoke at his first TEDx Talk in Delft about his ocean clean up initiative.
He added, “After a month, we got a call from TED-Ed headquarters which is based in New York and I was chosen to demonstrate my idea through a presentation and a 3D design. We were given three months’ time to prepare for it. So my father connected me to several scientists, 3D modelling artists, programmers and experts to assist me in making the ship. On June 2017, I delivered my first TED talk and I was the youngest among all.”
In December 2018, he delivered his presentation and speech on the same project at TEDxGateway which is Asia’s biggest Ted talk, as a young innovator.
That’s how Ervis was born, a futuristic ship with saucers attached, that can clean waste matter floating on the ocean surface, analyze the waste collected and stop waste at source, prevent it from getting disposed of by ships.
What is Ervis?
Ervis is basically a gigantic vacuum cleaner with many cleaning tubes attached to many dust bags. Once the waste enters the chambers, Ervis analyses, segregates and compacts it, and pumps the filtered water back into the ocean, without harming any marine life in the process.
The ship is essentially a large boat powered by hydrogen and renewable natural gas with compartments and saucers surrounding it. The saucers float on the surface and gravitate to create a whirlpool to pull the waste towards its centre. These saucers will have a central outlet which will swallow the waste and is connected through a tube to various chambers in the ship. These chambers include an oil chamber which collects waste oil. There are four more chambers which are for large, medium, small and micro waste respectively. He and designers are putting their efforts on the prototype model of the ship. The model will be ready in the next three to four months. He has also got an opportunity to present his idea to people for fund raising and soon by collective responsibility they will be approaching the local bodies and government.
