1/14/2024 0 Comments Corona usa beach cleanup![]() We think that such would represent a business plan that could also successfully convince big funding companies and the crowd-funding public to make The Ocean Cleanup an even bigger success than it already is. But maybe we can challenge the Ocean Cleanup to also spend a substantial part of its funds to other solutions than cleaning up in distant gyres. In that sense, our enumeration of alternatives is rather theoretical small-talk. Of course, we are well aware that the Ocean Cleanup, without its spectacular aura of cleaning up the historic debt of our misbehaviour in distant oceans, would not be able to generate its current level of funds and support from public, big companies and governments. When responding to this type of comments, the Ocean Cleanup does confirm that source reduction is also important, but nevertheless, as far as can be seen, spends all of its funds in end-of-the-pipeline solutions. Even when success of these things is moderate, they offer a better perspective than the 0.1% removal of annual input in the current planning. And finally if you think of ‘cleaning up of the ocean’, to work on designs that could operate close to river outflows or along the coastline. Or work on technological improvements to filter plastics out of sewage discharges or rivers. Or design clever waste storage systems to be used onboard ships. Or think about designing smarter, reusable and truly recyclable plastic packaging. ![]() One might think of technical solutions to reduce losses of nets or other objects from fisheries, or to facilitate their recovery. Personally, we tend to think that the smart engineer Boyan Slat and his team had better focus their skills and creativity on technical solutions that tackle the plastic problem at its roots. With the 0.1% figure in the back of one’s mind, it becomes a personal decision on how to balance costs and benefits of the Ocean Cleanup. Of course, each bit of plastic taken out of the ocean may help, but it is far away from an efficient clean-up of the plastics that we continuously lose to our environment. That quantity thus certainly represents less than 0.5% of our annual plastic input, or less than 0.1% per operational year of the Ocean Cleanup. When the Ocean Cleanup works according to plan at its full scale of about 60 units of the current 600m model, it expects over a period of five years to be able to remove about half of the plastics from the garbage patch, so roughly 40,000 tonnes. In combination with debris from marine sources (fisheries, aquaculture, shipping, offshore industry) the ‘fishable’ quantify of plastics from the Pacific Garbage Patch will thus be well below 1% of the plastics that we ANNUALLY lose to our oceans. 2015), a range often simplified to about 8 million tonnes. The mass of 80.000 ton accumulated floating plastics approximately equals 1% of the quantity of plastics lost to sea ANNUALLY from land-based sources, estimated at between 5 to 13 million tonnes of plastic ( Jambeck et al. The floating litter in terms of plastic mass mainly consists of larger objects, and almost half is fishing net material. That estimate compares reasonably well with some of the earlier estimates from much smaller datasets ( Van Sebille et al. The Ocean Cleanup has estimated that the north Pacific Gyre encircles a garbage patch containing about 80,000 tons of plastic litter ( Lebreton et al 2018). In that full set-up, the Ocean Cleanup estimates that it will be able to reduce the garbage patch by about half in five years. If this test model proves to be satisfactory, it is the intention of the project to scale up to about 60 of such units. ![]() The current system is a test model consisting of a 600m long floating synthetic curtain that will form a trap for floating litter. Now that The Ocean Cleanup project has started towing its first boom-system to the ‘garbage patch’ in the north Pacific Ocean, we again receive a lot of questions. ![]() New test phase of The Ocean Cleanup in September 2018 ![]()
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