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'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.
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'Ocean Cleanup' Successfully Removes 63,000 Pounds from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch

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  • 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)

      by dfm3 ( 830843 ) on Sunday October 31, 2021 @05:55AM (#61944185) Journal
      No, it's not visibly noticeable (at least from the air) and not just because the big stuff is so diffuse: much of the mass is actually microplastics and microscopic particles that have been weathered and broken down over time due to sunlight. It's a harsh environment and many plastics begin to grow brittle and break apart after months to years, but they don't chemically break down and remain in the water.
      • 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.

  • by hackertourist ( 2202674 ) on Sunday October 31, 2021 @03:23AM (#61943977)

    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.

    • You can't block the river mouths, the large rivers have boat traffic.

      • by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Sunday October 31, 2021 @04:07AM (#61944033)

        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.

      • Besides. Doing that will just teach the locals to use it as a garbageshoot. Someone at the end is cleaning it up anyway, so why not...
        • That's the dumbest possible response. They're already using it as such. Nobody has to teach them.

        • They obviously already learned that, else the river wouldn't look like that.

        • 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

        • 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

      • by Zocalo ( 252965 ) on Sunday October 31, 2021 @05:36AM (#61944163) Homepage
        You might not need to. There is a currently a pilot of a system [theguardian.com] that uses bubbles of air injected from below the surface to create a virtual funnel that directs the floating and suspended trash in one of Amsterdam's canals to a collection point on shore. Claimed efficiency figures are something in the region of 80% of trash captured and removed. I'll give you that a canal is a pretty idealistic model of a real river, but the basic principles should still hold, and from what I recall from keeping tropical fish many years ago aeration of water is a pretty good thing, so any bubbles that dissolve in the water should benefit the downstream river environment as well.

        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.
        • by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Sunday October 31, 2021 @07:10AM (#61944293) Homepage Journal

          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.

          • 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.

      • 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.

        • 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!

          • 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).

            • 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

      • I remember reading an article about someone developing a ‘bubble wall’ that caused floating debris to drop deeper in a river, below the draft of ships and boats, where it was then caught by a conveyor like net. The idea being that it did not block the ships, boats, and water animals the way a regular net, but would still scoop up the major part of debris in the water. Obviously sufficiently small trash would still escape, but that is true of any net.
    • by rminsk ( 831757 ) on Sunday October 31, 2021 @05:32AM (#61944153)
      Part of this groups plan is to capture the plastic trash before it enters the ocean. https://theoceancleanup.com/ri... [theoceancleanup.com]
    • 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.

    • 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

    • 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

  • 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.

  • Start with bamboo toothbrushes, then zero waste tooth paste, reusable cups (for coffee outside that you bring to shops to fill), carry reusable bags, avoid foods and snacks that have excess packaging, fast food places are notorious for waste--avoid them, chip away at mass wasteful unsustainable consumption. Bring re-usable straws with you. Look into mining garbage and using the methane as a power source. Change what and how we consume and unfuck the planet. Fujitsu made laptops made from corn: https://www. [cnet.com]
    • by dvice ( 6309704 )

      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.

      • No. North America produces 70% of the world's garbage. The slums pollute, but we pollute longer, harder, and stronger. That needs to change.
        • 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.

          • Not really, those landfills produce methane and seep chemicals into soil and drinking water. Most waste is not dealt with appropriately. E waste used to be shipped to China, but not any more. Clothing waste shipped to other countries is literally burying the populace. That 70% of the world's waste is unsustainable and we do not have the resources or will or space to contain it.
  • by ravenshrike ( 808508 ) on Sunday October 31, 2021 @06:04AM (#61944195)

    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

    • 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.

      • 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'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.

          • by djinn6 ( 1868030 )

            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.

    • Okay then let's just give up and do nothing at all. Clearly the more efficient approach.
  • by VeryFluffyBunny ( 5037285 ) on Sunday October 31, 2021 @06:08AM (#61944199)
    ...to stop the pollution at source. The biggest producers of plastics that end up dumped in the environment are a relatively small number of corporations, e.g. Cocacola & Pepsico. Just make them stop it at a relatively low cost, e.g. legislate re-usable containers & require collection (as they already do in Germany) &/or require recycling (no just theoretically 'recyclable' which then gets dumped in the environment), so that tax payers don't have to subsidise their business models by cleaning up after them at a relatively high cost. The principle is to make the producers of pollution responsible for cleaning it up & for them to pay 100% for it as they produce it. If the price of diabetes-inducing sugary drinks & water needlessly bottled in disposable plastic bottles goes up as a result, that's a win-win IMHO.
    • I totally agree. The fact that this is necessary only highlights the impact of money and shareholders on the integrity of human beings.
  • 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)

    by cascadingstylesheet ( 140919 ) on Sunday October 31, 2021 @06:35AM (#61944239) Journal

    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?

    • 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

      • by djinn6 ( 1868030 )

        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

    • by icejai ( 214906 )

      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."

  • 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.

  • From earlier in October from Gizmodo: The Dream of Scooping Plastic From the Ocean Is Still Aliveâ"and Problematic "They spent I donâ(TM)t know how many tens of millions of dollars to invent fishing." https://gizmodo.com/the-dream-... [gizmodo.com]
  • 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.

  • The net result: Everyone knows you will clean up their trash so they just dump more trash into the ocean. Free trash disposal and pickup.
  • 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.

  • 50% of ocean plastic is fishing nets, according to the documentary Seaspiracy. Looks about right.

  • I saw a hopeful video of a smaller scavenger that operates in the small percentage of ocean-feeding rivers that are the largest sources of sea garbage. With a simple weir across the surface, this device could convey virtually all of the incoming trash to dumpsters that cycle through and are then removed to processing facilities by conventional methods. The video pointed out that the end goal is more effective alternatives to people who end up dumping their trash in the rivers because they have nowhere else
  • Surely something that large will be visible with satellite photography. Why haven't we seen nice large, top-down views of this "patch"? Bonus: show me a large cargo container right next to it for scale. Or a shipping container full of bananas, if that's your thing
  • I want to believe! This project is the most amazing and credible thing I've seen in a long, long time. I only wish they would stop using USA units, because, you know, there's a whole world out there that doesn't know wtf 63,000 "pounds" is.
    • by djinn6 ( 1868030 )

      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.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • 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...

    • 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.

  • 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?

    • 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.

  • I assume we've already passed the "set it on fire", "blow it up", "blow it up with nukes" and "launch it into space" phases, right?

    Last I heard, it was "someone else's problem" and "not our fault" (our being ubiquitous).

    To those trying: keep it up, thank you

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