Saving Seafood

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

 

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