'Ocean Cleanup' Successfully Removes 63,000 Pounds from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (yahoo.com) 121
More than 63,000 pounds of trash — including a refrigerator — have now been removed from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, reports USA Today:
A half-mile long trash-trapping system named "Jenny" was sent out in late July to collect waste, pulling out many items that came from humans like toothbrushes, VHS tapes, golf balls, shoes and fishing gear. Jenny made nine trash extractions over the 12-week cleanup phase, with one extraction netting nearly 20,000 pounds of debris by itself.
The mountain of recovered waste arrived in British Columbia, Canada, this month, with much of it set to be recycled. But this was not a one-off initiative. In fact, it was simply a testing phase. And the cleanup team is hoping it's only the start of more to come: more equipment, more extractions and cleaner oceans.
The catalyst behind the cleaning is The Ocean Cleanup, a nonprofit trying to rid the world's oceans of plastic. Boyan Slat, who founded the organization in 2013 at the age of 18, called the most recent testing phase a success, but said there's still much to be done. The 27-year-old from the Netherlands said the group can enter a new phase of cleanup after testing eased some scalability concerns and proved that the system could accomplish what it was designed to do: collect debris... It hopes to deploy enough cleaning systems to reduce the size of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch by 50% every five years and to initiate a 90% reduction in floating ocean plastic by 2040... While Jenny tackles the garbage patch, The Ocean Cleanup will work on a larger, full-scale cleaning system set to be released in summer 2022 that expects to be the blueprint for creating a fleet of systems.
Slat projects they will need 10 full-scale systems to clean the patch at a rate of just under 20,000 tons per year, which would put the group on par to reach its goal of reducing the mass by 50% in five years.
The garbage patch now has its own page on Wikipedia, which points out that some of the plastic in the patch is over 50 years old. "The patch is believed to have increased '10-fold each decade' since 1945. Estimated to be double the size of Texas, the area contains more than 3 million tons of plastic." So it's even more amazing that "It's within the realm of possibility for the first time since the invention of plastic that we can clean up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch," Slat tells USA Today.
The group also says that 95% of the plastic it collects can be recycled. And they've already begun turning that plastic into products like sunglasses to be sold on its website.
The mountain of recovered waste arrived in British Columbia, Canada, this month, with much of it set to be recycled. But this was not a one-off initiative. In fact, it was simply a testing phase. And the cleanup team is hoping it's only the start of more to come: more equipment, more extractions and cleaner oceans.
The catalyst behind the cleaning is The Ocean Cleanup, a nonprofit trying to rid the world's oceans of plastic. Boyan Slat, who founded the organization in 2013 at the age of 18, called the most recent testing phase a success, but said there's still much to be done. The 27-year-old from the Netherlands said the group can enter a new phase of cleanup after testing eased some scalability concerns and proved that the system could accomplish what it was designed to do: collect debris... It hopes to deploy enough cleaning systems to reduce the size of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch by 50% every five years and to initiate a 90% reduction in floating ocean plastic by 2040... While Jenny tackles the garbage patch, The Ocean Cleanup will work on a larger, full-scale cleaning system set to be released in summer 2022 that expects to be the blueprint for creating a fleet of systems.
Slat projects they will need 10 full-scale systems to clean the patch at a rate of just under 20,000 tons per year, which would put the group on par to reach its goal of reducing the mass by 50% in five years.
The garbage patch now has its own page on Wikipedia, which points out that some of the plastic in the patch is over 50 years old. "The patch is believed to have increased '10-fold each decade' since 1945. Estimated to be double the size of Texas, the area contains more than 3 million tons of plastic." So it's even more amazing that "It's within the realm of possibility for the first time since the invention of plastic that we can clean up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch," Slat tells USA Today.
The group also says that 95% of the plastic it collects can be recycled. And they've already begun turning that plastic into products like sunglasses to be sold on its website.
Wait a second (Score:2)
3 million tons spread out over twice the area of Texas .. is that even noticeable? Come on man. That's a ton spread out over 2 million square feet. That's like one compact car parked in the area of a shopping mall (including parking lot).
Re:Wait a second (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Indeed - and microplastics, being slow to break down are more or less everywhere now. You can count on some being in the average Texan, as well as pretty much everyone else.
The video I saw of the cleanup showed a lot of big stuff coming up - like the plastic crates used to carry bottles from the truck to the store, baskets etc. All of that will eventually break down into smaller and smaller bits, but getting rid of the big stuff seems like a good first start to me.
Cleanup should be at the source (Score:5, Informative)
Most of the plastic trash in the oceans comes from a few large rivers [scientificamerican.com]. Deploy this in the mouth of these rivers and you'd catch the plastic before it spreads over a huge area. Alternative, stop the Chinese and Indians from putting so much crap in their rivers.
Once that's done, sure, start chasing the plastic that's already in the Pacific Garbage Patch.
Re: (Score:2)
You can't block the river mouths, the large rivers have boat traffic.
Re:Cleanup should be at the source (Score:4)
You can't block the river mouths, the large rivers have boat traffic.
Go to Google and type "Asian river of trash" and then click "Images".
You will see many many rivers with layers of trash so thick you can't see the water. Plenty of them are smaller tributaries with no boat traffic.
Until we deal with the trash at the source, we should not be wasting resources looking for tiny micro-particles spread across millions of square miles in the central Pacific.
Re: Cleanup should be at the source (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
That's the dumbest possible response. They're already using it as such. Nobody has to teach them.
Re: (Score:2)
Sure, that's a real complaint. But if the alternative is to catch the trash in the ocean at great expense, surely it's worth it for someone else to pay to catch it at the rivermouth at a lesser expense?
Re: (Score:3)
They obviously already learned that, else the river wouldn't look like that.
Re: (Score:2)
It seems to me that if you're standing on the riverbank holding a piece of plastic and contemplating the inconvenience of proper disposal, it is polluting the river itself that you're standing by that would be the immediate concern that might influence your behavior. The churn out in the middle of the ocean, away from most animals, and that already has a bunch of garbage? If you're worried about that, you didn't even consider throwing the plastic in the river, because you're the sort of person who is that m
Re: (Score:2)
The locals in that area already use it as a garbage bin. For you and me, we get rid of our trash by putting it on the curb and a truck comes by to whisk it away. For many areas, there is no garbage truck/garbage man. They are just too poor and/or too remote to have garbage collection services. The trash needs to go somewhere, though, so they dump it in a pile that eventually makes its way to local rivers. The rivers sweep the trash away from the town preventing them from drowning in trash, but causing "tras
Re:Cleanup should be at the source (Score:5, Informative)
It's clearly not feasible to install this on every river but, as the GP points out, you'd only need to deploy it on the most polluted rivers to make a huge difference to the total amount entering the oceans - assuming you can scale the system up to the necessary size; most of the rivers on the list are a lot wider than the Westerdok, and many also have massive deltas, so you'd only really be able to filter some distance from the ocean and/or on the main channels. For some rivers, it might make sense to filter at multiple points anyway, as that would likely mean more chance of capturing individual pieces of garbage, and also successively improve the water quality downstream of each filtration plant.
All that still doesn't fix the root cause of the problem though. If you're not going after the people putting the trash into the water in the first place and hitting them up with fines/jailtime, then you're ultimately going to be fighting a losing battle. If the exponential growth figures in TFA are even remotely accurate, this kind of waste disposal has become second nature for many cultures/industries, implying that prohibition of dumping, let alone enforcement of it, is near non-existant. It's going to take a massive amount of political will and public education to change that.
Re:Cleanup should be at the source (Score:4, Informative)
If you're not going after the people putting the trash into the water in the first place and hitting them up with fines/jailtime, then you're ultimately going to be fighting a losing battle.
It would be cheaper to provide trash service to the people throwing the trash in the river, they presumably already don't have money so you can't meaningfully fine them.
If you have evidence that rich people are doing it, by all means fine them, but making the poor poorer isn't going to reduce the trash they dump illicitly. It's just going to make them sneakier. The trash will still end up washing into the rivers.
Re: (Score:2)
It would be cheaper to provide trash service to the people throwing the trash in the river, they presumably already don't have money so you can't meaningfully fine them.
A lot of people don't even realize that litter is a problem. It took a several decades long advertising campaign to get people to stop littering in the US (along with fines, which do influence poor people also). People used to litter in Hollywood movies. So in addition to providing trash service, a public education campaign is important.
And as you say, trash service is important. It's hard to throw trash away if there isn't a trash can anywhere nearby. Although people still do it in Japan.
Re: (Score:3)
Conveniently, the system they're using now in the Pacific is easy enough to deploy at a river mouth: you can maneuver the net between passing ships. Ocean Cleanup also has a system that places two partial barriers in the river: these act to funnel the plastic into a barge at the end of one of the barriers. Ships can pass between the barriers.
Re: (Score:2)
you can maneuver the net between passing ships
That's a huge expense.
Requiring additional maneuvers at a river mouth is dubious and only possible for some rivers with very wide navigation channels.
I'm sure there are lots of places where you could install a partial barrier and reduce the plastic flow, but the idea of capturing it all in rivers is nuts. It is even more difficult than not dumping it in the river in the first place!
Re: (Score:2)
It doesn't have to be right on the mouth of the river. It's much easier to do at sea, where you can separate marine traffic from the direction that will contain most of the debris.
Capturing it all in/on the mouth of rivers is more doable than systematically trawling the entirety of the Pacific Garbage Patch (1.4 million km^2).
Re: (Score:2)
Perhaps. It seems like a reasonable idea. But merely measuring the size of the garbage patch doesn't complete the analysis.
Instead of waving your hands at it, you'd need to figure out the actual cost to everybody, both installing the system and navigating around it, and compare that to running 10 of the full-sized systems discussed in the summary. It may be that the inconvenience at the river mouths costs more than collecting it at sea, and that efforts would be better spent on finding specific places on th
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Cleanup should be at the source (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:3)
Most of the plastic trash in the oceans comes from a few large rivers [scientificamerican.com]. Deploy this in the mouth of these rivers
These countries may not be rich, but mostly they just don't GAF. Catch the trash from the rivers and air drop it only the centers of government, and their private residences. Give them a reason to care.
Re: (Score:3)
They’re addressing it on that end too. This is the same group that’s currently being promoted by a large number of YouTube creators as part of a #TeamSeas fundraiser. For instance, Mark Rober (the former NASA engineer who’s now probably more famous for glitter bombing porch pirates) recently talked about a system designed to do exactly what you’re talking about [youtu.be], and he even briefly spoke in the video with the guy mentioned in the summary. Long story short, they agree with you and are
Re: (Score:3)
Most of the plastic trash in the oceans comes from a few large rivers [scientificamerican.com].
Oh my god is this stupid misrepresentation still making the rounds? That's the problem with scientific "reporting" these days. They don't even bother reading the abstracts before writing articles.
Let me fix your quote:
"Most of the plastic trash in the oceans which comes from rivers comes from a few large rivers [scientificamerican.com]." That's all the study ever said despite what the media reported. The study exclusively looked at trash coming from rivers and concluded most came from just a few. It is stil
A few large rivers [Re:Cleanup should be at...] (Score:2)
Most of the plastic trash in the oceans comes from a few large rivers ...
... The trash from those few rivers in a years time is roughly 10% of what is already there. 10% is not "most", it is a rather small amount.
Wait, what?? If the trash from those few rivers is 10% of what's there per year, then over ten years, those few rivers have contributed 100% of what's there. That's not "a rather small amount," it's nearly all of the trash.
Both [Re:Cleanup should be at the source] (Score:3)
That would blame poor people in third world countries and not Americans. That's a big no-no among the hard left environmental set. If you could find a way to blame America they'd get behind it.
Although there is some truth to that, there is more truth to the opposite: rather than addressing our own behavior, and looking at dealing with things that we can control, people like you work at finding a way to blame it on people far away, so you can say "we don't have to do anything, it's all somebody else's fault".
The actual truth is: both. Americans contribute to the problem, and also non-Americans contribute to the problems. But it's easy to say "the problem is other people far away" as a way to avoi
8 Million tonnes of plastic per year (Score:1)
are dumped into oceans every year according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
https://www.iucn.org/resources... [iucn.org]
How big a fleet are they planning because it better be in the hundreds of thousands to have any hope of reducing what's already there, let alone what's coming in.
Bamboo toothbrush (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
No.
Ocean plastic comes from 1% of the rivers in the world. Those rivers get majority of waste from slums around the river. Slums don't want to dump garbage into the river, they just don't have any alternative.
Get funding, arrange waste management to those slums and it helps a lot more than buying bamboo toothbrush for yourself, which you would anyway dispose properly.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
No. North America produces 70% of the world's garbage. The slums pollute, but we pollute longer, harder, and stronger. That needs to change.
That may be true.
But it doesn't mean America is creating the most pollution. Just that they produce the most waste. Most of it is dealt with appropriately. It's not going in the ocean in any meaningful amounts compared to other countries.
Re: (Score:2)
This is the equivalent of pissing in the wind. (Score:4, Informative)
If you actually wanted to stop plastic pollution you would outlaw plastics in washable clothing(shoes, hats, and bulky jackets are not much of an issue) as that is the biggest source of microplastics in the environment
Re: (Score:2)
If you actually wanted to stop plastic pollution you would outlaw plastics in washable clothing(shoes, hats, and bulky jackets are not much of an issue) as that is the biggest source of microplastics in the environment
You're not wrong, but this isn't about microplastics. It's macro-level trash, which is a completely different problem.
Re: (Score:2)
No, it's about publicity. The great garbage patch has a minimal effect on the environment compared to microplastics or the mouths of rivers choked with plastic, but damn if it doesn't make good headlines.
I'd love to see your home. (Score:2)
I'm sure when you had some potato chip bags and some empty coffee cups on the floor you ignore them, since, you know, there's dust everywhere.
Re: (Score:2)
More like there's dust everywhere on the nearest freeway. Most would agree that should be cleaned up, very few care enough to personally involve themselves.
Re: (Score:2)
It makes more sense... (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Scalability (Score:2)
One of the other cleanup projects pulls out about 60 Tons in a week IIRC. Their limiting factor is just the size of the vessel they need to haul back that much stuff. Ghost fishing nets are apparently the worst issue, some nets weighing in at over 5 tons.
reactions (Score:4, Insightful)
Reading the various reactions to this is interesting.
There are clearly some people who don't want this to be mitigated.
One can't help wondering about the psychology of that. Stockholm syndrome? Some sort of religious impulse?
Re: (Score:2)
One can't help wondering about the psychology of that. Stockholm syndrome? Some sort of religious impulse?
If I were a gambling man, I'd probably blame the fact that mitigation tends to either be ineffective or differently-problematic.
My township did plastic recycling for years...then it was discovered that they were just burning it. After getting caught with their pants down, they really-really recycled it, by sending it to a larger recycling company...who sent it to China, who then burned most of it. After China said 'no thanks', that company started sending it to The Philippines, where it mostly got burned. I
Re: (Score:2)
The big problem with recycling in the US is the attempt to privatize it. Trash, even most recyclable types, are negative-value goods. Private enterprises will always try to find a way to get rid of it rather than doing the work to recycle it. It's too easy to ship stuff offshore and dispose of it in countries that don't enforce their dumping regulations well, or even dump it out at sea when no one is looking.
One solution is to purchase recycled materials at inflated prices. This in turn artificially inflate
Re: (Score:2)
One possible reason:
They might not want to *do* anything. Like, expend the effort. Not because they disagree with the cause, but because it's "effort".
So maybe they try to rationalise their lack of effort by convincing themselves that the effort makes no difference.
"I want that apple, but it's too far away. Meh, I didn't want it anyway."
And then what? (Score:2)
So they extract the plastic and then what? Make more useless plastic products from it, who were probably not bought if they were not made.
If you really want to recycle, find an existing manufacturer who will use it to *replace* its existing plastics source, don't create yet another manufacturer of plastic products, because this will not reduce plastic consumption by existing manufacturers.
Gizmodo published a great article covering this bo (Score:1)
What was living in the fridge? (Score:3)
The problem with cleaning up macroscopic plastic is that lots of animals use it for habitat once itâ(TM)s out there. I'm honestly much more interested in cleaning up microplastics and fishing line. I know that plastic in the gyre is often ground up into microplastics, but it is not an obvious win to me to remove a fridge from the ocean if something was trying to lay eggs in it or shelter from predators or what have you.
By all means, stop plastic at the source. Reduce its use, donâ(TM)t let it flow in from rivers. Clean microplastics out of the seawater if you can find a way. Collect and destroy discarded fishing tackle so it can't endanger sea life.
We have the resulst coming, Aaaand (Score:1)
Goofball (Score:2)
Critics also note the large carbon footprint of the type of boats, called Maersk ships, used to drag the large net, per Earther. The Ocean Collective has previously said they plan to purchase carbon offsets to rectify this concern.
No good deed goes unpunished. No weighing of overall benefits vs. miniscule net cost. There are 50,000 seagoing large ships round the clock. Get a clue, innumerate whiners.
Lot of fishing nets in the story's picture (Score:2)
50% of ocean plastic is fishing nets, according to the documentary Seaspiracy. Looks about right.
Ocean Cleanup begins at the source (Score:1)
where are the photos? (Score:2)
that's 28,600 kg, for everyone else (Score:2)
How the hell does a refrigerator float? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
A well-built refrigerator contains some structural elements, a compressor, a set of condenser / evaporator coils, and a whole lot of insulation. That last part is often made of polyurethane foam, which is both a plastic and lighter than water.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Twice the size of Texas. (Score:1)
This is some serious real estate. I'm on my way to stick a flag and declare independence. Just imagine the potential for the tourism industry. If I build it they will come...
Re: (Score:2)
This is some serious real estate. I'm on my way to stick a flag and declare independence.
Pretty sure William Gibson, or Neal Stephenson, or maybe both, worked such a scenario into a couple books.
WHOSE dumping puts it there in the first place? (Score:2)
My plastic goes into the local landfill and high volume riverine waste dumping is rare in the first world.
So where is this garbage patch coming from? Much ado is rightly made about the mess, but which humans MADE the mess and how can they be stopped?
Re: (Score:3)
Some countries seem to have kitchen sinks with grinders in them, so you can "conveniently" dispose of anything small enough through the sink. I suspect lots of people are accustomed to throwing things through the toilet as well. Our chemistry class had a nice article about a boy who stole a jar of Sodium from a chemistry class, telling that his mother found out and flushed the entire jar through the toilet. The toilet did not survive this.
Wastewater usually ends of in the sea.
Re: (Score:2)
ALL other options (Score:2)
Last I heard, it was "someone else's problem" and "not our fault" (our being ubiquitous).
To those trying: keep it up, thank you
Re:Successful? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
False assumption.
Re: (Score:2)
"You couldn't even be bothered to read the summary, let alone TFA? "
You must be new here, welcome!
Who's the idiot ShanghaiBill? (Score:3, Insightful)
Cleaning the source now isn't going to fix the problem that's already there is it...
Who's the idiot ShanghaiBill?
Re:Successful? (Score:4, Insightful)
But unless you can show that these measures are mutually exclusive, like in that if we remove trash this way it'll stop us from preventing producing as much trash at the source, that sounds very much like a Nirvana Fallacy.
Removing tip of the 'trashberg' is still an improvement over not doing it at all about the garbage that is already out there, that is assuming that removal doesn't create more even more trash.
Re:Successful? (Score:5, Interesting)
And there is not "a" source anyway. A lot of this is stuff that's dumped off or fell off ships. Both cargo waste and fishing waste.
I'd hate to take on another project right now, but I've been so tempted for ages to ask them for a few kilos of recovered shredded plastic, because I really want to test out an idea for using it to recover oceanic minerals. Seawater "mining" has long been of interest, as the oceans are a virtually endless resource of many different minerals, but the concentrations are low. One common technique is to exploit the fact that polymers tend to intercalate metal cations - if you leave plastic floating around at sea for long periods, it tends to become concentrated with metals, which is generally seen as a problem, as it becomes more toxic. Companies seeking to exploit this property create polymers selective to specific types of cations and have those float out in the ocean for months or years at a time, then recover them. Really expensive, though, and hasn't paid off thusfar. But with trash, we have polymers - albeit entirely nonselective ones - floating around for years or even decades. I keep wondering, if you ran it through a sulfuric acid bath and electrowinnowing stage, how much of what minerals might you recover? Could it possibly pay for the trash recovery itself, maybe even with profit to spare, while simultaneously detoxifying the trash?
Re: (Score:2)
** Electrowinning.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
You can argue that life on Earth evolved with plenty of silica compounds in their environment for it not to be a health concerns. After all most of the fucking sand all over Earth is quartz, reducing most health concerns about silica to accumulation of fine silica dust on our lungs.
But nooo. You need t
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Of course another alternative would be reusable metal containers.
In theory metal containers are good. It can be made fairly thin and light and doesn't break that easily due to its ductility. Because it blocks light, it also prevents the food from being affected by decay induced through exposure to light.
But for some reason I've seen people being more afraid of metal containers like cans (mostly for
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:2)
The problem is that people in general not being driven by rationality, which as a business can affect your sales. (Also a reason why you can buy 'vegan fruit juice' around here, because you know, so much fruit juice is otherwise made from animals.)
Like I said, by now there's plenty of ev
Re: (Score:2)
I suppose you could make people even afraid of glass, despite humanity having used it as a container for food and drink for millennia.
No argument here, I bet you could indeed with a carefully engineered social media campaign.
I'll be keeping my styptic pencil in any case.
Re: (Score:2)
Who said glass? In Germany, most of their drinks containers are plastic but they're thicker, more durable & re-usable -- no real difference in weight.
Those two statements are mutually exclusive. If the containers are the same size but thicker, they are heavier.
Also, it is not enough that something is "re-usable", it must actually re-used.
Re: (Score:2)
If you had thought about this statement for perhaps three, maybe four seconds, you would realize just how not true it was.
Hint: just because the container is thicker doesn't necessarily mean that interior of the container wall has the same density or structure as the container wall.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
If you had thought about this statement for perhaps three, maybe four seconds, you would realize just how not true it was.
I did. You're wrong.
For bottles of the same shape and size and material, if the wall is thicker, the container is heaver. This isn't even physics, this is simple geometry.
Hint: just because the container is thicker doesn't necessarily mean that interior of the container wall has the same density or structure as the container wall.
If you're saying "but what if they redesigned the container?" no, it's still true, take that redesigned container, and make an identical one with a thinner wall. If the containers are the same size. the thicker-walled one is heavier. Which is what I said.
(and if you're suggesting that maybe they used a different lower density material, I
Re: (Score:3)
. I keep wondering, if you ran it through a sulfuric acid bath and electrowinnowing stage, how much of what minerals might you recover? Could it possibly pay for the trash recovery itself, maybe even with profit to spare, while simultaneously detoxifying the trash?
I have always been fascinated by this possibility itself, having first learned of it from reading about Fritz Haber's (of the Haber-Bosch process which keeps us all alive) attempt to pay of Germany's WWI debt by extracting gold from seawater. Since then I am sure there are uncountable engineers and scientists who have thought about it and ultimately ran into the insurmountable cost/benefit problems associated with known technology.
As for your idea of electrowinnowing, wouldn't you have a lot of waste pro
Re: (Score:2)
but I've been so tempted for ages to ask them for a few kilos of recovered shredded plastic,
Go for it!
Re: (Score:2)
Some of the work out of ORNL looks promising for uranium extraction which has been an interest of mine. Polymer strands would have a good surface area for binding. My thought is it would be cool to make a stand-alone ocean plant which uses the thermal differences between deep water and surface to drive an ammonia turbine loop, use the power to flow water past the polymers and complete the turbine cycle, excess power to grid.
https://www.ornl.gov/news/bio-... [ornl.gov]
https://www.ornl.gov/news/ornl... [ornl.gov]
Would love to see
Re: (Score:2)
But unless you can show that these measures are mutually exclusive
If you spend dollars on X then you can't spend those same dollars on Y.
Resources are finite. They should be spent where they are most effective. Straining micro-particles out of millions of square kilometers of seawater is vastly less effective than removing concentrated piles of plastic garbage from rivers.
Re: (Score:2)
But as far as our entire planet is concerned we are rarely in such a triage situation where if we do more than one thing at a time, the only outcome can be ruin.
As a result, most of those lines of argumentation turns out to be the rather common Fallacy of Relative Privation, which appeals to the "not as bad as" sentiment. This kind of thinking is problematic, because without differentiation there's pretty much always something worse around, that if not solved will lead
Re: (Score:2)
It is a test of an idiotic idea.
It is a thousand times easier to clean up trash at the source than once it is in the ocean and thousands of miles out at sea.
The "garbage patch" is empty ocean with particles of plastic suspended in the water column. Compare that to this river of trash in Asia [dornob.com].
So how are you going to force China and the Phillipines and Tailand to stop dumping plastic?
China will ignore the plastic they are dumping, and the other two will just claim that we are picking on third world countries.
Its a sad fact, that the USA and to a lesser extent Europe are blamed for this, so if it is going to be cleaned, it's going to be a first world group doing it.
Re: (Score:2)
So how are you going to force China and the Phillipines and Tailand to stop dumping plastic?
Why is "force" needed?
If you go to the Philippines, the police aren't going to stop you from removing plastic from a river and recycling it.
The only difference between removing plastic from the middle of the ocean and removing it from rivers is that for each dollar spent, the latter results in a thousand-fold greater reduction of oceanic plastic.
Re: (Score:2)
So how are you going to force China and the Phillipines and Tailand to stop dumping plastic?
Why is "force" needed?
If you go to the Philippines, the police aren't going to stop you from removing plastic from a river and recycling it.
The only difference between removing plastic from the middle of the ocean and removing it from rivers is that for each dollar spent, the latter results in a thousand-fold greater reduction of oceanic plastic.
This is pretty simple - if there was no force needed (and this is force broadly defined) then we wouldn't be having this conversation. They would have stopped already.
And really, the Netherlands parking a plastic collection boat outside of their rivers probably won't go over too well.
The main point is that the countries performing the pollution should be required to clean it up. And that country isn't the Netherlands.
Finally, an even better idea would be for the guilty parties to not place the plasti
Re: (Score:2)
The "garbage patch" is empty ocean with particles of plastic suspended in the water column.
That's why it's impressive they were able to get so much out.
Re: (Score:2)
That's why it's impressive they were able to get so much out.
It would only be impressive if they did it cost-effectively and without burning more fuel than the plastic they removed. They did neither.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, "stop digging" is the first step to getting out of a hole. However, after step 1 is complete, you still are standing in a hole. At some point you need to do something to get out and then fill the hole in.
Not making a massive shitpile of trash in the ocean bigger is a good start, but even if you drop the amount of trash finding it's way into the oceans to zero, there's still tens of thousands of tons of trash in the shitpile that already exists, which needs to be cleaned up.
Not sure why this isn't pai
Re: (Score:3)
And the way this is being reported is giving a "mission accomplished" vibe.
Put your glasses on, grampy, the summary says,
to initiate a 90% reduction in floating ocean plastic by 2040...
The Ocean Cleanup will work on a larger, full-scale cleaning system set to be released in summer 2022 that expects to be the blueprint for creating a fleet of systems.
Slat projects they will need 10 full-scale systems to clean the patch at a rate of just under 20,000 tons per year, which would put the group on par to reach its goal of reducing the mass by 50% in five years.
Re:Successful? (Score:4, Insightful)
If you bothered to look into Ocean Cleanup you would find that they also clean up plastic at the source, including helping local communities. In a somewhat surprising revelation for a non-profit, they aren't actually present at all the sources due to a distinct lack of almost infinite resources.
Now that we established that you are to lazy to even look up publicly available information, we can then also assume that your idea of paying some hungry Filipino kids to clean up hundred of tons of plastics to be somewhat lacking in thought.
Re: (Score:1)
they aren't actually present at all the sources due to a distinct lack of almost infinite resources.
That's the point. Resources are limited. So should they be expending those resources removing dispersed micro-particles from the middle of the ocean, or preventing millions of tons of plastic from entering the ocean in the first place? The 2nd option is a thousand times as cost-effective.
Re: (Score:2)
And the way this is being reported is giving a "mission accomplished" vibe.
Given the $40m they have spent they really haven't accomplished any mission at all, other than finding a way to spend money. Most of the articles focus on having removed a plastic while ignoring how much it cost to do it.
The reality is, trawling with a garbage net for products that are borderline unsellable is not a financially viable option, and neither is a mission supported by donations which they themselves estimate is worth $1bn (though many think this is an underestimate).
Re: (Score:2)
They removed about 32 tons.
The patch is estimated at roughly 80,000 tons.
Summary says 3,000,000 tons.
That's 0.001% of the plastic picked up. Another 100,000 trips like that and they'll have it all.
Except it will become exponentially more difficult as they go along. And a lot of the plastic is microplastics that really can't be "scooped" out of the ocean.
Don't get me wrong: Picking out the big stuff before it turns to microplastics is a very very good thing but let's not get carried away and think this is a solution to the problem. We also need to stop dumping trash into the sea.
Re: (Score:3)
There are 8 million metric tons dumped into the ocean each year.
https://oceanconservancy.org/t... [oceanconservancy.org]