The point of the article is that this intervention is actively harmful for exactly the same reasons raised by experts a long time ago.
> In my opinion, that's better than doing nothing at all.
This attitude is wrong IMO. The issue with high-profile half-baked interventions is that they distract from real unsexy solutions like grab the plastic in rivers BEFORE they make it to the ocean.
This is self-evident from data on their own website! https://theoceancleanup.com/sources/ . River mouths/estuaries are also some of the most densely populated regions in the world. This bites in that it is easy for plastic to enter the ocean. But it's also a lot easier to run cleanup at the source, next to humans, rather than 3000km away in the middle of the ocean.
> distract from real unsexy solutions like grab the plastic in rivers BEFORE they make it to the ocean.
They pivoted to mostly river cleanup (interceptors) many years ago. And they clearly show that it is just one step back, not a full time solution. Ocean cleanup is last step, river grab is the step before that and having proper garbage collection would be best.
Which is literally written in TFA:
> Now they mostly intercept plastic when it first leaves rivers and enters the ocean instead of trying to scoop it out of the middle of the ocean, though the open ocean work is still mentioned on their website
See, you've just shown how you have fallen for the very trap that is being discussed: you think garbage collection is the solution. Plastic recycling was never a valid solution to the problem of plastic trash in the environment.
Recycling was a non-solution the oil and plastics industries used to deflect criticism of their products. They knew would never be feasible because the polymer is no longer in a state that is suitable for re-use once it's been heated and formed, and that degradation gets even worse as it ages, is exposed to UV, etc. Anything made with it will be inferior. Weaker, not as dense, and so on.
They also knew that it would be impossible for any significant amount of plastic to be recycled, even if it was feasible to re-use it.
It also shifted the onus from the producers of a wildly harmful material to the consumers. "It's those litterbugs!"
The auto industry managed to shift public perception from "cars are insanely dangerous products" to "idiot leeches of society are throwing themselves in front of car drivers who are upstanding people who contribute to society!" Seriously - look at the cartoons from the early auto industry era. The "jaywalker" is portrayed as slovenly, poor, and stupid. The car owner is portrayed as well dressed, intelligent...
The plastics industry has turned things from "our products never, ever go away. They break down into tinier and tinier pieces, and the particles are so prolific that there literally isn't a single place on earth not contaminated by them, not a single creature that hasn't ingested them, and it's now in our brains"...
...to "silly irresponsible people are not responsibly disposing of their plastics so they can be recycled by us responsible plastic producers! Look, we sponsor beach trash cleanup groups! Look at this picture of our smiling employees spending a day in safety vests helping collect plastic from a couple hundred square feet of beach!"
Think about that. Plastic is in your brain. That's how thoroughly contaminated the entire planet and ecosystem is. And it's because the plastic and oil industry deflected "plastics are bad" with non-solutions and claims about recycling and pictures of neonatal babies inside plastic incubators with plastic tubes and plastic IV bags. Do YOU want to have that preemie die because the evil hippies want to take away your plastic, mnau?
For a lot of applications plastic is also simply a really good material. It is cheap, easy to form, strong, can be made either rigid or flexible, and has a low CO2 footprint. When it comes to inherently single-use applications it is incredibly difficult to beat plastic, and even for multi-use applications it often doesn't look great for materials like metal or glass.
And yes, littering is the main downside. I agree that recycling is mainly bullshit, but you can also burn it together with the rest of the trash, and get some free electricity from it!
Microplastics are indeed a serious problem, but it is almost entirely unrelated to day-to-day plastic items. The primary source of microplastics is car tires, with synthetic clothing being a large contributor as well. And there's of course the absolutely insane use of plastic particles in personal hygiene products. If you want to reduce our microplastics exposure, those are probably better places to start.
Quite. And quite the opposite - I hear a lot of messaging encouraging us to consume more. To the point that most Westerners (and no doubt others) have a strong sense of entitlement when it comes to consumption. If you ever bring this sort of thing up with people the entitlement becomes obvious. We feel entitled to be transported thousands of miles in a matter of hours for 'a break'. We feel entitled to some of the most inconsiderate vehicles ever produced because "how else am I going to tow my boat/horse float?" As if a lifestyle that involves moving massive things around is a god-given right. And all of this within a matter of two or three generations. We truly live in the most entitled times.
Our personal morality has been corrupted by convenience and commerce. Too many people think that if something is legal, possible, and affordable, then why not? No room for consideration of others. Quite simply (and please excuse the strong language) we have become a bunch of selfish fucks. But because it's now the norm to be a selfish fuck then that makes it okay, right?
I've always admired the approach of my grandparents. Practical, economical, and able to enjoy doing the simple things that are actually necessary for living a good life. Sadly, that generation is passing. What are our grandchildren going to think of us?
> Quite. And quite the opposite - I hear a lot of messaging encouraging us to consume more. To the point that most Westerners (and no doubt others) have a strong sense of entitlement when it comes to consumption. If you ever bring this sort of thing up with people the entitlement becomes obvious. We feel entitled to be transported thousands of miles in a matter of hours for 'a break'. We feel entitled to some of the most inconsiderate vehicles ever produced because "how else am I going to tow my boat/horse float?" As if a lifestyle that involves moving massive things around is a god-given right. And all of this within a matter of two or three generations. We truly live in the most entitled times.
Where do the people who understand this congregate?
> (and no doubt others)
While the top 30 on this entitlement ranking will contain a lot of Western countries, I can unfortunately confirm that they're far from alone, and in fact none of them will even take the top spot.
The poster said proper garbage collection, not recycling. Recycling may or may not be part of the disposal picture, but properly containing the plastic in a properly managed landfill is also a perfectly acceptable solution.
> Do YOU want to have that preemie die because the evil hippies want to take away your plastic, mnau?
Honestly, you sound like you have problems. Personal attack, tangent from original theme "don't have plastic in the ocean" to multi paragraph rant about RRR. Have a nice day.
My read of the article is that they’ve also pivoted to the methods experts suggest as well. The article actually phrases that in a negative way weirdly. I agree with the original comment, at least they’re trying and iterating. You get conflicting feedback from experts in all cases. At some point you have to commit and try.
Alternatively, creating incentives for plastics to never be deposited in rivers to begin with...
"The results, published last November in Environmental Science & Technology, show that rivers collectively dump anywhere from 0.47 million to 2.75 million metric tons of plastic into the seas every year, depending on the data used in the models. The 10 rivers that carry 93 percent of that trash are the Yangtze, Yellow, Hai, Pearl, Amur, Mekong, Indus and Ganges Delta in Asia, and the Niger and Nile in Africa. The Yangtze alone dumps up to an estimated 1.5 million metric tons of plastic waste into the Yellow Sea."
How about regulate plastic so it doesn't end up in the river in the first place?
Worrying about cleanup without worrying about why we have to clean it up in the first place is a losing approach. It reads as just 'recycle better' without wondering why consumers have that burden in the first place.
There are many countries involved, who may be unable or unwilling to pass or enforce the kinds of necessary laws. And people who donate want to see outcomes like "removed X tons of garbage", not "continued to lobby government to pass law".
Also wild guess consumers in your country aren’t dumping their trash in the river because you have a function garbage system. It is mainly an issue with poor people in developing countries with no access (or cost prohibitive access) to garbage collection. Not sure if taxing the very poorest on earth is great.
The difference is you can start processing plastic in the middle of the ocean NOW with very little oversight. Capturing river plastic requires collaboration of local authorities and people. This turns a purely technical solution into a human solution which is messy and slow and different everywhere. Even though it's the better thing to do to have a chance at stopping the damage.
> The issue with high-profile half-baked interventions is that they distract from real unsexy solutions like grab the plastic in rivers BEFORE they make it to the ocean.
You mean they distract from doing… exactly what they are doing?
Maybe give a team that has been working on this problem for 10+ years enough credit to check what they are doing before dismissing them.
> This attitude is wrong IMO. The issue with high-profile half-baked interventions is that they distract from real unsexy solutions like grab the plastic in rivers BEFORE they make it to the ocean.
This system change nonsense is why no progress has been made on climate change for the past 2 decades.
Could have been well on the way either way solar and wind if a pile of other issues weren’t bundled into the conversation.
I read the first linked article where these experts in ocean plastic and ocean engineering supposedly give their great insights, back in 2015. It lists "6 Reasons That Floating Ocean Plastic Cleanup Gizmo is a Horrible Idea" (what a headline!). But the six reasons are either unhelpful, unconstructive, arguments in bad faith, silly, or exactly the sort of stop energy that activists specialize in. They were:
1. Ocean plastic doesn't behave the way the project's backers say it does.
Ocean Cleanup said the amount of plastic drops off exponentially fast after three meters of depth. The rebuttal of the expert oceanographers is that they stopped looking after five meters (as you'd expect if it drops off sharply after three), and that plastic can also be found at 100m of depth. This is presented as mistake by Ocean Cleanup but obviously isn't. Neither fact is incompatible with nearly all the plastic being in shallow depths.
Then they ding it because the machine as designed can't capture pieces of plastic smaller than 2cm, although lots of plastic has degraded to tiny particles. This is the nirvana fallacy in action: you aren't planning a perfect solution to the problem, therefore you're misleading people when you say you're going to tackle it. Only childish people think like this. Engineers know no solution is ever perfect.
2. The collectors will break really quickly
In 2004 the booms in the feasibility study weren't specced to a level that could survive large storms. It was designed to raise money and see if any plastic could be collected at all, so this is expected. Then it says Boyan Slat planned to do the 2015 test in the "relatively protected waters of the Korean Strait" i.e. somewhere large storms wouldn't necessarily be a problem. This isn't a critique.
3. The project will harm wildlife
By wildlife they mean plankton. This is a ridiculous and bad faith argument, the sort of critique that could apply to literally any object in the ocean including sperm whales.
4. Recyclers don't want the plastic
So? It can be landfilled. The goal is to get it out of the ocean, not create new Coke bottles. This critique makes no sense.
5. There's a far more effective way
They mean getting volunteers to pick trash off beaches. Very NGO mindset: why mechanize when you can hold a splashy single-day event and make everyone feel good about themselves. It was obvious why that doesn't work. The link they give to find the next event is a 404 and the NGO website containing it no longer mentions any beach cleanup events. Instead the "Take Action Against Plastics" section of their site now asks people to lobby Congress.
6. It's better to not put plastic in the ocean in the first place
Obviously. But people do, which is why the project exists. This is not a reason why trying to remove plastic from the ocean is a "horrible idea".
So: six arguments, of which the best is that the initial PoC wasn't built to production specifications - the sort of argument only people who have never built anything make. I don't see any reason to side against Slat here.
> In my opinion, that's better than doing nothing at all.
This attitude is wrong IMO. The issue with high-profile half-baked interventions is that they distract from real unsexy solutions like grab the plastic in rivers BEFORE they make it to the ocean.
This is self-evident from data on their own website! https://theoceancleanup.com/sources/ . River mouths/estuaries are also some of the most densely populated regions in the world. This bites in that it is easy for plastic to enter the ocean. But it's also a lot easier to run cleanup at the source, next to humans, rather than 3000km away in the middle of the ocean.