"of the 79,000 metric tons of plastic in the patch, most of it is abandoned fishing gear—not plastic bottles or packaging drawing headlines today ... fishing nets account for 46 percent of the trash, with the majority of the rest composed of other fishing industry gear, including ropes, oyster spacers, eel traps, crates, and baskets."[1]
They're likely referring to China, over the past 5+ years there's been a number of articles about how they're taking liberties with the ocean territory of other countries, doing things like turning off transponders to hide, and the vast scale of their fleets.
"The United States’ contribution of plastic waste to land and ocean"
Abstract:
> Plastic waste affects environmental quality and ecosystem health. In 2010, an estimated 5 to 13 million metric tons (Mt) of plastic waste entered the ocean from both developing countries with insufficient solid waste infrastructure and high-income countries with very high waste generation. We demonstrate that, in 2016, the United States generated the largest amount of plastic waste of any country in the world (42.0 Mt). Between 0.14 and 0.41 Mt of this waste was illegally dumped in the United States, and 0.15 to 0.99 Mt was inadequately managed in countries that imported materials collected in the United States for recycling. Accounting for these contributions, the amount of plastic waste generated in the United States estimated to enter the coastal environment in 2016 was up to five times larger than that estimated for 2010, rendering the United States’ contribution among the highest in the world
Must be the "Republic of They" that everyone is always talking about. "They are coming here and taking our jobs!", "They are polluting the ocean!", etc
But we also need to stop it happening again. Which means stopping fishing nets and plastic trash from being dumped in the sea by ships. And preventing plastic that is dumped into rivers in developing countries [1] from reaching the sea. These are hard problems.
Given that ~80% of the GPGP is from commercial fishing, I don't know how we ever stop them or catch them. A factory can be checked at its outflows. We'd have to monitor and catalog everything on every fishing ship and that just doesn't scale. At best we could add a fee to global commercial fishing fee to all boats based on the wholesale of their catch and spend that on clean up and other sustainability efforts.
I assume not but that could become tied the ability to import and the western countries could try to drive that. Again, not an easy thing to even get your head around let alone implement.
In this particular case I think it’s worth specifically calling out The Philippines, who are responsible for a third of all ocean waste. India are second at ~12%, but also with a billion and a half people that’s a little more understandable
The fishing market is 600B $... So if they invest 1% of that market size into the cleaning, they can go on with current practices... They can even improve the process and make it cheaper.
1% is a lot.. gross margin for the big bulk fishing operations is around 10% so you are asking them to give up 10% of their profits
To put 1% in more context, the biggest companies like P&G, Verizon, Progressive Insurance etc will never spend more that 3% of revenue MAXIMUM on their total marketing budget..and that is money that they directly measure ROI from.
This is the same line of thinking as "we just need $X to wipe out all college debt/medical debt". Sure, you can do it, but what happens when the same amount of debt is racked up again in a couple years? Do you keep using taxpayer money/crowdfunding/whatever else to pay it off every time? Or should you stop and address the core problem first, then fix the symptoms?
This is the same line of thinking as "we just need $X to wipe out all college debt/medical debt". Sure, you can do it, but what happens when the same amount of debt is racked up again in a couple years?
So you never clean your toilet because it's just going to get dirty again?
"I'm not spending a dime or a second of MY time cleaning this toilet (that I also use) until someone fixes the root-cause, now AND forever! (never mind that I am also at least partially a contributing factor if I've ever eaten a single fish in my entire life)"
> The Ocean Cleanup’s operations demonstrate that the elimination of the GPGP can be done at today’s level of performance in 10 years at a cost of $7.5bn
> Data and modelling indicate that the removal of the GPGP could be achieved in 5 years at a cost of $4bn
We should do this at either price point, but ... what's the difference here? If we can do it faster and cheaper, why put the higher price quote in the headline? Is the 'data and modeling' including some extrapolation that assumes performance will increase meaningfully once they're started at scale?
1) We have been doing some cleaning and, based on our real results that we have recorded, we are saying it can be cleaned up for $7.5bn over 10 years.
2) Separately, we have also done some thinking and modeling about other approaches and we project that we could probably clean up the same area in less time for less money.
Yah, the press release is written in a confusing way. I wish they were more clear about where those two numbers are coming from but that is my read of what they are trying to say.
True, but "filled with lots" and "slurry" might also be misleading. It's many tiny particles of plastic across a really big area, with the pieces so small and far between that it's generally not visible from the surface.
Here's John Cook's description:
So how dense is it? Let’s assume 80,000 metric tons over an area twice the size of Texas. The area of Texas is 700,000 km² , so that’s 8 × 10^10 grams of trash over 1.4 × 10^12 square meters, or 57 milligrams per square meter.
An empty water bottle weighs about 20 grams, and an American football field covers 5300 square meters, so this would be the same density of plastic as 15 empty water bottles scattered over a football field.
This is the cost of cleaning the Pacific Ocean's great garbage patch[a] with System 03[b], a cleaning process designed, deployed and operated by the OP's organization for removing garbage from the ocean and recycling much of it (e.g., non-biodegradable plastics) into new products.
Even if the cost estimate of $7.5B is off by a factor of 2x or 3x, deploying this technology to clean up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch looks like a no-brainer to me. The long-term financial benefits for the world could be multiple orders of magnitude larger.
> Why is System 03 so much bigger than System 002?
> Size matters because cleaning the ocean becomes cheaper and more efficient with bigger systems. By making System 03 so much bigger than our previous efforts (alongside the multiple upgrades we’ve implemented) we can cover a much larger area of ocean in less time and using fewer resources – driving down our cost per kilogram of plastic removed and maximizing our benefit on the marine environment. System 002 proved our technology and demonstrated that cleaning the GPGP is feasible; System 03 aims to prove that it is also economically viable. Scaling up to this size is an essential step towards meeting that objective.
It's refreshing to see this vocabulary/way of talking used on an environmentalist website.
These are unknowable at these scales and levels of complexity. Such
lack of imagination shouldn't be an obstacle to starting anyway. Some
things are self-evidently "gonna be great".
I am fascinated by the era of National Projects, like Apollo and the
Hoover (Boulder) dam. What we need in this world right now (other than
love sweet love) is a massive feel-good project. 7bn is piffling small
change in the context of projects like Apollo (the US Moon landings).
What we now understand about the "space race" in its cold-war context
is that it was more about pride, signalling achievement and willpower
than any actual strategic significance. Stuff you do "because you can".
William James penned "The Moral Equivalent of War" (which president
Carter riffed on) in an era when there was so much less cynicism,
disaffection, resignation and apathy, and when grand projects were
something people got excited about, and got behind instead of
shrugging "who will pay for it?"
Instead of seeing this as a chore, and arguing about whose garbage it
is, a smart political leader would see an opportunity. America (or
whatever coalition gets there first) might re-invent herself as the
"responsible citizen" of the Earth. There are good, and unexpected
things that happen to wealth when stepping up and becoming the "moral
leader".
Its hard to put concrete numbers to it, but there are many ways you can generally draw connections from "intact wildlife ecosystems" to economic benefits on n-th order effects.
E.g.
- Less plastic in the ocean -> less microplastics in fish -> healthier people -> less cost due to sickness, and a more productive population
- Less fishing net debris in the ocean -> less species of turtles going extinct -> more tourism for turtle watching (IDK if that's a thing)
On some fronts with wildlife conservation you can also draw a more direct line. E.g. vulture conservation essentially pays for itself, as vultures do carcass cleanup of diseased animals for free (preventing the spread of the disease through the ecosystem, eventually reaching humans), where the equivalent cleanup would be quite expensive. My guess with ocean conservation is that the "direct economic benefit" is mostly in the realm of fish as food resource.
You're conflating "plastic in the ocean" with "plastic in the Pacific garbage patch".
The plastic tends to accumulate far from land (or so the model animations I've seen indicate). And most of the fish and other wildlife are near land.
Indeed, overlaying models of where the plastic is with a fishing heat map (e.g. globalfishingwatch.org) shows very little overlap between fishing areas and garbage areas.
I'm not sure what you are seeing when you are overlaying those maps, but I am seeing a clear overlap between the western extent of the pacific garbage patch, and fishing activity.
Besides that, you are conflating "where fish are fished" with "where fish live/grow up". Many fished species (and/or their prey) heavily migrate, and when migrating take advantage of the same ocean currents that lead to formation of the garbage patch, and are thus in close proximity. Of course the majority of fishing activity will be close to land, as that's more economical, but that doesn't mean that the fish fished there have only grown up their and/or not been exposed through to plastic via their food chain.
Maybe a dumb question, but why? I don't like that it exists, but isn't it self-contained? The main reason for cleaning it up seems to be quoted as [1], which oversimplfies to 'animals might eat plastic, and it affects them', and it will make microplastics. But these problems seem to be localized to the garbage patch. I could see it as a asbestos situation where its only problematic if you disturb it. Ongoing dumping seems to be a bigger problem as it's not localized.
Yea, desire to fix a lot of environmental issues is driven by worry about the unknown consequences, which can be a genuine reason but it's hard to know how much you can justify spending on it, and willful ignorance because worrying about the environment is fashionable. It might turn out to be harmless or even beneficial, you never know. The article says the plastic costs up to $2.5T annually but doesn't specify a lower bound, so I assume the minimum cost is negative. It doesn't help that reporters use these dirty salesman tricks to fool people the same way a shop having sale might advertise "up to 50% off all stock" when really only a small minority of products have such a big discount.
That is factored into their approach. See https://theoceancleanup.com/rivers for multiple approaches on how to prevent plastic from making its way into the ocean.
Also from the about section of the blog post:
> They aim to achieve this goal through a dual strategy: intercepting in rivers to stop the flow and cleaning up what has already accumulated in the ocean. [...] To curb the tide via rivers, The Ocean Cleanup has developed Interceptor™ Solutions to halt and extract riverine plastic before it reaches the ocean.
Nothing. Philippines is the largest contributor [1], Western countries will clean, Indonesia will continue, it’s a money transfer from the West to Philippines through a garbage medium.
Because those are two separate problems, and not having a solution for one shouldn't stop you from dealing with the second. If you can remove it faster than it grows, other folks can deal with tackling the vastly more complex issue of getting the entire planet to reduce their dependency plastics.
The scale of various projects is quite interesting. This costs less than connecting SF's Transbay Terminal (near which I work) to its Caltrain station (near which I live). My commute is currently 7 min by city rental ebike. $8b to save the 7 min. Or $7.5b to clean the garbage patch.
> The Ocean Cleanup’s operations demonstrate that the elimination of the GPGP can be done at today’s level of performance in 10 years at a cost of $7.5bn
> Data and modelling indicate that the removal of the GPGP could be achieved in 5 years at a cost of $4bn
10 years at $7.5bn or 5 years at $4bn? I'll take 2.5 years at $2.5bn. That kind of tells me that there are enormous labour costs.
What I really want to know is what they are doing with it once collected.
> Ocean plastic pollution is one of the most urgent problems our oceans face today, costing the world up to $2.5 trillion per year in damage to economies, industries, and the environment
I'd like to see a breakdown of that. My suspicion is that this random floating patch of rubbish hardly affects economies or industries at all.
> To put the cost of clean oceans in context, the annual spend in the US on Halloween decorations is $10.6bn USD; US pet food spending in 2024 was $66.9bn USD; the combined net worth of the top 10 richest people is $1.66tn USD, and 1% of the annual net profits of the world’s plastic producers is $7.2bn USD.
What has the predicted worth (that is mostly non-liquid) of the top 10 richest people got to do with anything?
I did think "why not just scoop it up into a retrofitted ship and take it away?". The following seems interesting [1]:
> Despite the common public perception of the patch existing as giant islands of floating garbage, its low density (4 particles per cubic metre (3.1/cu yd)) prevents detection by satellite imagery, or even by casual boaters or divers in the area. This is because the patch is a widely dispersed area consisting primarily of suspended "fingernail-sized or smaller"—often microscopic—particles in the upper water column known as microplastics.
> What has the predicted worth (that is mostly non-liquid) of the top 10 richest people got to do with anything?
There used to be a time when rich people did something for the common good with all their (often questionably) gotten money. Even kings had to buy the favor of the commoners, lest they start a riot, and the various variants of mafia are generally known for their generosity in areas where they set up shop. Today's neo-feudalist class has completely forgotten this very basic rule, and people are getting pissed massively.
As for why that is related? Well, easy, for someone like Jeff Bezos, funding ocean cleanup or whatever would be not even a tiny dent in his bank accounts...
> Even kings had to buy the favor of the commoners [..]
It was literally at the cost of death and the loss of wars.
> As for why that is related? Well, easy, for someone like Jeff Bezos, funding ocean cleanup or whatever would be not even a tiny dent in his bank accounts...
Are you going to revolt by not using Amazon services and products?
It's like scooping up chunks of feces from a drinking well but leaving behind a brown stained liquid with all the e. coli and other microbes you could ever need and everyone cheers, 'the village is saved!' all the stupid villagers cheer as they continue to shit in the well and grab their cups to get a drink.
The earth is a precious precious thing and we don't deserve it.
Pardon my own ignorance, but isn't it also bad to have all of this trash on land? I would love for it to get removed from the ocean, but what's the terminal state plan? I'm sure there's a plan, I'm just wondering what it is.
Well-managed landfills are among the best solutions I know. (After all, the oil that the plastic was made from was originally buried underground, and wasn't harming anyone there.)
> After all, the oil that the plastic was made from was originally buried underground, and wasn't harming anyone there
While I agree with your main point, that isn't really solid reasoning. Oil wells are typically so deep down, that yeah, the oil was too far in the ground to have the potential to harm anyone. But ground water (and ground water pollution is one of the concerns with landfills) are much higher up in the ground, and if you now put a landfill on top of it, it has the potential of seeping into ground water (if badly managed).
Page is unusable to me, if I try to opt-out through settings it just crashes :/
Nice way to force users to accept - not that I think this cookie terror banner practice makes any sense.
We could also build a nuclear aircraft carrier to go drive into the trash & reprocess it into a giant raft. Then a villain starts crafting a super virus & infecting people from the raft... Oh wait, that's the plot of Snow Crash.
Landfills. Theoceancleanup's own figure is that there is 100,000 tonnes of plastic. This one [0] landfill in Ohio gets 2 million tonnes each year. That's out of ~250 million tonnes produced by the US each year [1]. So it seems there is plenty of room.
So the plan is to spend 7 billion and however much carbon over 10 years to move pollutants from the middle of the Pacific Ocean, thousands of miles from anyone or any rich fisheries, to landfills near population centers?
Well, water is a solvent and dirt isn’t. That’s probably the reason why oil isn’t harmful in the ground and it is harmful when it’s spilled in the ocean.
Why would contaminating the environment of a major food supply be the least harmful place? how is that better than purpose built infrastructure to contain that trash?
They do also work on intercepting from rivers [0], but what do you propose? We should just leave all that garbage in the ocean and just try not to look at it?
You tell me. What would happen if we left "all that garbage in the ocean and just try not to look at it" ? What if all the effort and funding was focused on the waste production problem and materials problem instead of trying to collecting it in the open ocean? How long would it take for the waste to fall to the seafloor and then be covered by falling sediment? What is the EROI of both approaches?
I am convinced they mean well and are trying to tackle a tractable problem, but the garbage patch cleanup is not a good use of limited resources.
This organization also has projects about stopping plastic in rivers from entering the ocean. Maybe this isn't the ultimate source, but it's literally upstream of the ocean. This is more of a "yes and" situation -- we need both.
I generally agree that the root cause should be addressed first (student debt is a great example) and the good news is that I believe this project is tackling both simultaneously.
>They aim to achieve this goal through a dual strategy: intercepting in rivers to stop the flow and cleaning up what has already accumulated in the ocean.
[1]https://web.archive.org/web/20190618030308/https://news.nati...