Saving Seafood

The man who discovered the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is still trying to stop ocean pollution

May 3, 2023 — Growing up in Long Beach California, Captain Charles Moore quickly developed a love for the ocean.

Moore’s father was a chemist and sailor who frequently took him and his siblings out on the Pacific. Moore fondly recalls their long conversations about science while they stared out into the water.

“When you get out there and jump in and just see that deep blue going on forever,” he says. “The biggest kind of surprise that you can get as a human being, in terms of knowing the planet that you occupy.”

So it was fate as much as luck that, decades later, it was Moore who discovered the largest-ever accumulation of plastic waste in the Pacific Ocean — what’s commonly known as the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch.”

In 1997, Moore was on a sailing trip from Honolulu to Santa Barbara when hurricane winds blew him way off course. He started noticing objects bobbing in the water, like coming across a plastic soup.

Moore started to play a game: Every 10 minutes, he’d come up to the deck to see if he could get a clear view of the ocean without any trash. Unfortunately, he never won.

“So I said, you know what, this has got to be more than just Hansel and Gretel leaving a trail of crumbs just for me to follow home. This is not what it is,” Moore recalls. “This is gotta be a bigger phenomenon.”

Read the full article at KCUR

River Traps Chew at Huge Ocean Plastics Problem

June 16, 2022 — Floating fences in India. Whimsical water- and solar-driven conveyor belts with googly eyes in Baltimore. Rechargeable aquatic drones and a bubble barrier in The Netherlands.

These are some of the sophisticated and at times low-tech inventions being deployed to capture plastic trash in rivers and streams before it can pollute the world’s oceans.

The devices are fledgling attempts to dent an estimated 8.8 million tons (8 metric tons) of plastic that gets into the ocean every year. Once there, it maims or kills marine plants and animals including whales,dolphins, and seabirds and accumulates in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and other vast swirls of currents.

Trash-gobbling traps on rivers and other waterways won’t eliminate ocean plastic but can help reduce it, say officials with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Marine Debris Program.

Read the full story at the Associated Press

 

The Ocean’s Biggest Garbage Pile Is Full of Floating Life

May 9, 2022 — In 2019, the French swimmer Benoit Lecomte swam over 300 nautical miles through the Great Pacific Garbage Patch to raise awareness about marine plastic pollution.

As he swam, he was often surprised to find that he wasn’t alone.

“Every time I saw plastic debris floating, there was life all around it,” Mr. Lecomte said.

The patch was less a garbage island than a garbage soup of plastic bottles, fishing nets, tires and toothbrushes. And floating at its surface were blue dragon nudibranchs, Portuguese man-o-wars, and other small surface-dwelling animals, which are collectively known as neuston.

Scientists aboard the ship supporting Mr. Lecomte’s swim systematically sampled the patch’s surface waters. The team found that there were much higher concentrations of neuston within the patch than outside it. In some parts of the patch, there were nearly as many neuston as pieces of plastic.

“I had this hypothesis that gyres concentrate life and plastic in similar ways, but it was still really surprising to see just how much we found out there,” said Rebecca Helm, an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina and co-author of the study. “The density was really staggering. To see them in that concentration was like, wow.”

The findings were posted last month on bioRxiv and have not yet been subjected to peer review. But if they hold up, Dr. Helm and other scientists say, it may complicate efforts by conservationists to remove the immense and ever-growing amount of plastic in the patch.

Read the full story at the New York Times

That giant trash patch in the middle of the ocean is getting bigger. Here’s what’s happening

November 9, 2021 — In the Pacific Ocean, two massive floating islands of trash extend for hundreds of miles, together making up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The pervasive vortices of human-made garbage damage marine life, as well as the environment, and can even exacerbate human-caused climate change.

In August, the environmental nonprofit Ocean Cleanup deployed Jenny, its first large-scale cleaning system, which has since removed more than 63,000 pounds of trash. In October, Ocean Cleanup called that work the “beginning of the end of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.” It’s a start. But the clumps of human-made trash are getting larger.

Ocean trash is only one area of focus as world leaders continue to meet for COP26 this week, the United Nations Climate Change Conference, which lasts through Nov. 12. At the summit, roughly 200 nations are meeting in Glasgow, Scotland, to negotiate an updated agreement of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in an attempt to keep temperatures from rising 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

Plastic pollution and microplastics have been shown to contribute to climate change, since heat can cause them to release greenhouse gases. Addressing the climate crisis requires reducing pollution in the oceans, which collect 8 million tons of plastic yearly.

Read the full story at CNET

 

The Dream of Scooping Plastic From the Ocean Is Still Alive—and Problematic

October 20, 2021 — This week, one of the world’s most-watched plastic clean-up projects will announce victory. The Ocean Cleanup, a nonprofit that has set out to solve the huge problem of plastics in the ocean, will hold a press event Wednesday where it will review the success of its latest system. The group has already said the contraption cleaned 20,000 pounds (9,070 kilograms) of trash out of the ocean on its latest mission and released dramatic footage of mounds of trash being pulled out of the ocean in a huge net.

“The day has come to celebrate the beginning of the end of the infamous Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” the organization wrote on its website announcing Wednesday’s event.

But with all that amazing capacity to scoop trash comes a whole lot of baggage: questions about the system’s impact on ecosystems, a history of aggressive fundraising for expensive failures, and bigger conversations about what kinds of solutions we should be funding to fix the world’s plastic crisis in the first place.

The Ocean Cleanup founder Boyan Slat made headlines in 2012 when, at age 18, he gave a TEDx Talk where he told a rapt audience that he’d figured out how to use technology to help passively clean the oceans of plastic. The revelation, he said, came after a scuba diving trip where he was shocked at the amount of plastic in the oceans. The video went viral, and soon the Dutch teenager had funding offers pouring in, aided by a barrage of high-profile media and celebrity support. The United Nations even awarded Slat with its Champion of the Earth award, what the organization calls its “highest environmental honour.” 

Read the full story at Gizmodo

 

Study seeks origins of ghost nets that haunt Hawaii’s shores

May 27, 2021 — Ghost nets” from unknown origins drift among the Pacific’s currents, threatening sea creatures and littering shorelines with the entangled remains of what they kill.

Lost or discarded at sea, sometimes decades ago, this fishing gear continues to wreak havoc on marine life and coral reefs in Hawaii.

Now, researchers are doing detective work to trace this harmful debris back to fisheries and manufacturers — and that takes extensive, in-depth analysis on tons of ghost nets.

The biggest concern is that derelict gear keeps killing fish and other wildlife such as endangered Hawaiian monk seals, seabirds and turtles long after it’s gone adrift, said Drew McWhirter, a graduate student at Hawaii Pacific University and one of the study’s lead researchers.

“These nets bulldoze over our reefs before they hit shore,” McWhirter added. “They leave a path of destruction, pulling coral heads out, and can cause a lot of ecological damage.”

Ghost nets foul oceans throughout the world, but the Hawaiian Islands — with the Great Pacific Garbage Patch to the east and another gyre of floating trash to the west — are an epicenter for marine waste.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at ABC News

Pacific bird refuge struggles as ocean garbage patch grows

November 11, 2019 — Flying into the uninhabited Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, Midway Atoll appears out of the vast blue Pacific as a tiny oasis of coral-fringed land with pristine white sand beaches that are teeming with life.

But on the ground, there’s a different scene: plastic, pollution and death.

With virtually no predators, Midway is a haven for many species of seabirds and is home to the largest colony of albatross in the world.

But Midway is also at the center of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a vast area of floating plastic collected by circulating oceanic currents. The Hawaiian Islands act like a comb that gathers debris as it floats across the Pacific. A recent analysis found that the patch is accumulating debris at a faster rate than scientists previously thought.

Midway is littered with bird skeletons that have brightly colored plastic protruding from their decomposing bellies. Bottle caps, toothbrushes and cigarette lighters sit in the centers of their feathery carcasses.

Read the full story at the Associated Press

Massive boom will corral Pacific Ocean’s plastic trash

September 10, 2018 — Engineers will deploy a trash collection device to corral plastic litter floating between California and Hawaii in an attempt to clean up the world’s largest garbage patch in the heart of the Pacific Ocean.

The 2,000-foot long floating boom will be towed Saturday from San Francisco to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch — an island of trash twice the size of Texas.

The system was created by The Ocean Cleanup, an organization founded by Boyan Slat, a 24-year-old innovator from the Netherlands who first became passionate about cleaning the oceans when he went scuba diving at age 16 in the Mediterranean Sea and saw more plastic bags than fish.

“The plastic is really persistent and it doesn’t go away by itself and the time to act is now,” Slat said, adding that researchers with his organization found plastic going back to the 1960s and 1970s bobbing in the patch.

The buoyant, a U-shaped barrier made of plastic and with a tapered 10-foot deep screen, is intended to act like a coastline, trapping some of the 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic that scientists estimate are swirling in that gyre but allowing marine life to safely swim beneath it.

Fitted with solar power lights, cameras, sensors and satellite antennas, the cleanup system will communicate its position at all times, allowing a support vessel to fish out the collected plastic every few months and transport it to dry land where it will be recycled, said Slat.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the New Bedford Standard Times