It seems like science needs more experiments and fewer naysayers. No one really knows if this will work, but it's relatively cheap ($23M--a rounding error on the scale most governments work at.)
I get tired of the folks who bash experimental solutions like this (a couple of whom are quoted in this article.) Yes, there is a possibility this will harm marine life. But, unquestionably, the plastic that is already in our oceans is already harming marine life. So we need to try.
This experiment will, if nothing else, provide additional data about what plastic is out there and what methods we can use to clean it up.
I hope the scientific community encourages and funds more of these experiments.
100% agreed. Cynicism abounds, but at least they're doing something even if it fails. Embracing failure, moving fast, learning, and pivoting needs not be limited to early-stage tech companies.
Folks, I do quantitative work in ocean conservation. I know what I am talking about here. Everyone in ocean conservation, including marine engineers, ecologists, etc, consider the Ocean Cleanup project to be misguided at best.
Haters gonna hate? I don’t get it. What’s wrong with preventing and cleaning? We’re enough people and there should be enough money around. Let’s just try
The thing is that this won't clean up anything. It is terrible for ecology, because it acts like a big net. It will kill plankton and other life. The long booms will (and have in testing) fail in storms. It also doesn't go deep enough to even collect most of the plastic.
I get that magical silver hammer solutions are attractive, but this is a global problem that will take actual work to solve.
The question isn't whether we should spend money on ocean cleanup vs doing nothing. The question is whether we should give money to "The Ocean Cleanup project" or spend it on more promising research. A glitzy looking project can steal the funding from other equally promising but less glamorous initiatives.
This project is not capable of collecting usable plastic. It is too degraded, too small. Everyone thinks there are big islands of garbage, but in fact it is distributed in small (often microscopic) particles throughout the first 100 meters of water.
This project is 100% BS. I do quantitative work in ocean conservation, and I can tell you everyone just considers Boyan a scam artist.
If this effort continues, eventually the only reasonable sink for this material will be to melt everything into slugs that may be dropped to the bottom.
It's a good question. Perhaps the answer is that we don't care about the benthic food chain? Perhaps the answer is that it will take a really long time? There's not much energy at the bottom to cause this degradation.
I wonder if an automated solar device that concentrates the plastic and warms the water to a few degrees above ambient would be a good way to culture and selectively enrich for bacteria capable of breaking down the plastic.
The actual solution is to stop manufacturing infinite plastic, and stop wrapping every single thing that is sold in throwaway plastic.
The idea that we can "clean it up" is the sort of foolish impossibility that the packaging industry / recycling industry / garbage manufacturing industry will latch on to to distract us from the real problem which is the never ending infinite unstoppable flow of garbage that they pour out every single day.
We need to stop making garbage, not try to clean up the flow that we make.
If you want to solve the "garbage world" that we now live in, start putting the blame on the packaging industry / the garbage makers.
Well, okay, but "make the entire world stop making plastic" is not something that an individual can actually do, while "build a big ocean plastic harvester" evidently is.
So... an individual is apparently capable of constructing thousands of miles worth of marine-environment infrastructure in international waters crisscrossed by global shipping routes, managing the continuing maintenance of such infrastructure, and the logistics of collecting transportation and disposable of thousands of tons of waste... but is unable to effect political change of any kind?
The point I was trying to make is that it isn't something that can be done as an individual, even if it works, at scale it will cost billions of dollars annually to operate, and will require the full time work of thousands of people. So pointing out that an individual can't change internally policy is a false comparison.
$28 million to launch the first version. Raising that much money and recruiting a team is easier than influencing election outcomes in numerous (probably 100+) elections.
After swimming (or attempting to swim, in those cases like Bacolod Philippines where the ocean was completely choked with floating trash) in the waters off various Pacific nations, I doubt that the nations who could possibly institute such a tax are the same as those who are causing this problem.
Are you suggesting that India and similarly deforested nations will decide they need paper so badly that they'll pay to ship it from USA? Rather than just cutting down the last trees they have, or (more likely) continuing to use plastic? They can't afford virtue-signaling frivolities like we can. If recycled cardboard packaging makes so much sense why are we shipping paper waste to China and anywhere else that will take it? Answer: landfills overseas aren't as embarrassing for "recycling" programs as landfills in the same county.
Personally I have nothing against paper/cardboard packaging. However, I note that people in USA have chosen plastic packaging for many applications. We can assume that the same reasons that motivate us, also motivate others. They also have other issues, like poverty. More regressive taxes on these populations will lead to more children dying of starvation.
As another comment noted, the way to actually fix the plastic pollution problem (distinct from the plastic cleanup problem that TFA targets) is to identify the watersheds that produce 95% of the plastic, and then help them set up modern garbage handling at price points that those people can actually afford to use. They are very poor, which is why they're polluting in the first place. Also many of these watersheds are islands with few suitable landfill locations. Instead of talking about silly things like laws that should be passed in other nations, let's talk about how much aid will be required to actually fix this problem.
The US has to pay to deal with the recycled paper, and I'm pretty sure it was cheaper to pay to ship it to China. So why not ship it to India? Container ships are very cheap.
> I note that people in USA have chosen plastic packaging for many applications.
Because it's cheaper. Taxing it fixes that.
> more children dying of starvation.
Geez, use the taxes to subsidize the paper packaging. This isn't all that difficult to figure out.
You seem to think this will be easy, this taxing-and-cross-subsidization. It has been proposed often enough to imagine that might be the case. Where has it been implemented? How did it work there? Might there be reason to suspect that it would be easier in a place where complicated tax laws already exist and most residents already pay taxes? Please note, the watersheds producing the bulk of this pollution are not such places. If you can't convince Americans to implement this scheme, why do you expect it will be easy to convince people in Southeast Asia?
The problem is your assuming "build a big ocean plastic harvester" is a totally valid solution that won't potentially add to the problem. Just because it's something an individual can do, doesn't mean it's good idea. How much will it hurt the ecosystem it's supposed help? Who is going maintain it? Who is going to recover it when it is torn apart in a storm?
"We need to stop making garbage, not try to clean up the flow that we make."
We need both actually. Stopping the manufacture of junk plastic will not cause the oceans to become cleaner. It will just stop them from getting worse. But in order to make the oceans cleaner, you need to actually remove the pollution that is in them.
Plastic does decompose, quite a bit faster in the ocean then it does in a landfill actually. That is why so much of the plastic is already broken down into very tiny particles. If we could stop any new plastics from entering the ocean, it would very slowly begin to clean itself.
The vast majority of plastic waste in the oceans come from just a handful of rivers that pass through countries that don't have garbage collection available as a society-wide service.
Investing in waste management infrastructure in the communities that live along the riverbanks would reap an immediate benefit to the people so affected, and stop pollution at the source.
To preempt the discussions that happen every single time this project comes up:
* Being able to clean up environmental messes is more important than preventing them in the future, and they are not mutually exclusive.
* The quality of the recovered plastics is lower than conventional recycled plastics, but they are sold at a premium to brands who want environmental responsibility credit.
* Yes, we should prevent plastics from reaching the ocean by cleaning at the mouth of the contributing rivers - but the only reason we have identified these primary sources contributing to the ocean garbage problem is because of the research published by this same group.
It's no substitution for actual data, but there is a basic logic to it. If you're bleeding now it's more important to stanch the wound than it is to worry about avoiding future wounds (they're also not mutually exclusive conditions).
Not sure analogies are strictly helpful here. Like, alternatively: Say there's a knife being pulled through your guts. Should you prioritise stopping the bleeding or trying to arrest the progress of the knife? The analysis here needs to be more quantitative: what are the returns on various mitigation and cleanup methods, and what do the respective rates of change imply in terms of comparative environmental impact over a fixed period of time?
There are messes that cannot be cleaned up. We have the leverage to destroy everything. Therefore it is better to focus on preventing the mess, than in futilely pretending we can clean it.
> Being able to clean up environmental messes is more important than preventing them in the future, and they are not mutually exclusive.
I disagree with the first clause of this point. I think it's better to prevent environmental messes to begin with. Don't get me wrong, I'm not denigrating cleaning up messes, that's important too. We'd be fucked it we couldn't clean up after ourselves. But from my perspective, a moderate amount of effort in the present can spare having to spend a greater amount of effort in the future.
That said, I'm glad work is being done to clean plastics from the ocean, hope it continues, and hope it is successful.
I think this actually overlaps almost identically with the philosophy of Aubrey DeGrey and the longevity/SENS movement.
Human activity is our planet's metabolism, and pollution is our accumulated cellular damage (age). To grow old, we must figure out how to repair damage, as it is impossible to entirely prevent aging, it is a natural and unavoidable consequence of our metabolism. So, we must learn to repair it.
> * Being able to clean up environmental messes is more important than preventing them in the future, and they are not mutually exclusive.
I want to discuss this point. I think some people are reading this as "clean up >>>>> prevention", which I don't think is your point. Rather, your point is more along the lines of the Agile Manifesto (we value X over Y, doesn't mean we don't value Y).
Clean up is more important now because we've created a mess and can't simply discard it. In quality control (for companies) it is more important to improve quality (reduce messes, by analogy) because that reduces the amount of time spent in later rework (cleanup, in this analogy). However, companies have the option of discarding (deletion if it's digital, recycling or trashing if it's physical) their inventory. Deletion and recycling waste nothing but the time initially spent on it. Trashing, however, is an option for a company because they're not in a closed system. It may be expensive, but it is an option. They can close a poorly functioning facility, or a contaminated plot of land, and go down the street.
From an environmental standpoint, the planet is effectively a closed system. We can't ignore the messes that exist and just move down the street like a business might. We all need healthy oceans, healthy rivers, healthy lands. And we will run out of those things if we don't clean up the messes that presently exist.
Obviously, we still need to prevent more of them from happening. But clean up ought to be a higher priority (as a percentage of global effort) with reduction in waste and environmental impact happening simultaneously.
Being able to clean up environmental messes is more important than preventing them in the future
This is the most short sited perspective imaginable, yes cleanup is important, but we're adding to this disaster at an increasing rate. Additionally, new materials are more dangerous to the ecosystem then those already there, the existing materials have already leached their coatings and additives into the water and started to decompose, adding new plastics adds more chemicals and restarts the clock on the process of decomposition. Reducing the incoming plastics by some amount is more important then removing that same amount, and doesn't have the same risk of adding to the waste, which this project seriously does.
The quality of the recovered plastic is zero. It will be an unsortable mix of unusably degraded and potentially contaminated plastics, other buoyant waste matter and various organic material. This will not be something that anyone can use, it will need to be disposed of, which is a huge cost this project is ignoring.
Environmentalists and experts on the marine ecosystem have been trumpeting this problem for longer than Slat has been alive. The "research published by this same group" ignores the huge amount of previous research that has been conducted, and ignored the existing studies that showed the depth of the plastics reaches as far as 100m, putting any numbers they suggest into question.
I work in ocean conservation, and this thread makes me sad. Anyone in ocean conservation can tell you this is BS, but sadly people in the tech industry have a tendency to discount the knowledge and opinion of experts in other fields.
I don't work in ocean conservation, but I spent my childhood in Southeast Asia, and saw very clearly how the plastic waste issue is more of a society wide garbage collection one. And having a proper waste management infrastructure would immediately improve the surrounding communities' health in addition to lessening the load on the world's oceans.
Yet I find that whenever I mention this in Tech circles, it's like people don't even hear what I said, and just go back to beating the 'plastic is bad' drum. It's bizarre.
People so fall in love of the idea of the lone young genius who did something nobody else could, and will save the world so they don't have to change any part of their life.
If you bring up the logistical, scientific and technical issues with the approach this project is taking, the response is "Well at least someone is doing something." It is so incredibly disrespectful to the countless people who have devoted their lives to studying and understanding these issues, ignoring that they have been trumpeting that this problem exists for decades and proposing changes that would help.
Is it the RealityTV mentality, where everyone wants to be famous, and building on solid foundations to solve problems with "boring" engineering isn't as sexy as being Tony Stark?
This project is a borderline scam, as anyone in ocean conservation will tell you. It is completely unpractical and impossible for numerous reasons. It would also devastate ocean ecosystems.
>Slat replies that there is not an either-or solution. “We need to do both,” he says. “We need to intercept plastic before it becomes ocean plastic. And we need to clean up what is out there.” Eriksen says that plastic on the high seas is mostly lost or discarded fishing gear. Fishermen could be paid or encouraged to collect it, which he says has worked reasonably well in the North Sea. The rest will eventually break down.
From your link. The last part is why we should get rid of it now, because it breaks down into the micro-plastics that marine life inevitably ends up consuming.
By the time it gets into these "garbage patches" it is already microscopic and distributed over the water column. What does make sense is to get fishermen to avoid losing gear. Also, trash collectors in bays and estuaries work very, very well. For example the Baltimore trash wheel. The difference is that near-shore trash collectors get it where it is highly concentrated, and before it breaks down into microplastics.
I'm sure someone here would be happy to explain to me why this won't work, but what if we built a recycling center in the middle of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch?
Ignoring the cost of building a giant floating recycling facility and providing it with amenities required to have people work/live on it, there's the difficulty of actually keeping it intact in violent ocean Typhoons.
The ocean patch is hundreds of thousands of square kilometers, think 2x the size of Texas and the plastics are dispersed through the top 100m of the water column. This is an extremely thin 'cloud' of small plastic bits, not a floating island of plastic bottles.
The problem with any collection-based solution such as this or the one being discussed in the article, is that the scale of the infrastructure and associated transport, maintenance, and support systems, required to actually collect a meaningful amount of waste would be far more damaging to the environment then the plastic waste itself, and would very likely introduce more waste and pollution into the environment.
Want to really "solve" plastics? Warm up the crispr kits and build bacteria capable of digesting the offending plastic. There is plenty of usable emery in there for the taking. The fisher community will want your blood for destroying all the fishing nets, followed by the plastics industry as a whole. But the ocean would be cleaner.
Saturday it launches from Alameda. It will pass under the Bay Bridge at 1pm and then pass infront of the SF water front. Finally, at 2pm it will pass under the Golden Gate to leave out to sea.
If anyone has a drone it'd be so cool if they could take a video of it sailing out.
Ideal scalable solution to the problem: Engineering a bacteria that feeds off of plastic and can only survive in saline water. The proposed solution in this article only touches the surface of the problem, literally. Even if it pans out, the surface of the ocean will be clean and may lead to the wrong conclusion that the ocean is rid of plastic.
68 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 90.8 ms ] threadIt seems like science needs more experiments and fewer naysayers. No one really knows if this will work, but it's relatively cheap ($23M--a rounding error on the scale most governments work at.)
I get tired of the folks who bash experimental solutions like this (a couple of whom are quoted in this article.) Yes, there is a possibility this will harm marine life. But, unquestionably, the plastic that is already in our oceans is already harming marine life. So we need to try.
This experiment will, if nothing else, provide additional data about what plastic is out there and what methods we can use to clean it up.
I hope the scientific community encourages and funds more of these experiments.
This absolutely will fail. There is no question about that.
edit: https://www.kcet.org/redefine/6-reasons-that-floating-ocean-...
https://inhabitat.com/the-fallacy-of-cleaning-the-gyres-of-p...
Folks, I do quantitative work in ocean conservation. I know what I am talking about here. Everyone in ocean conservation, including marine engineers, ecologists, etc, consider the Ocean Cleanup project to be misguided at best.
I get that magical silver hammer solutions are attractive, but this is a global problem that will take actual work to solve.
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2018/06/28/6239729...
This project is 100% BS. I do quantitative work in ocean conservation, and I can tell you everyone just considers Boyan a scam artist.
The idea that we can "clean it up" is the sort of foolish impossibility that the packaging industry / recycling industry / garbage manufacturing industry will latch on to to distract us from the real problem which is the never ending infinite unstoppable flow of garbage that they pour out every single day.
We need to stop making garbage, not try to clean up the flow that we make.
If you want to solve the "garbage world" that we now live in, start putting the blame on the packaging industry / the garbage makers.
I.e. how things were packaged before 1960.
Personally I have nothing against paper/cardboard packaging. However, I note that people in USA have chosen plastic packaging for many applications. We can assume that the same reasons that motivate us, also motivate others. They also have other issues, like poverty. More regressive taxes on these populations will lead to more children dying of starvation.
As another comment noted, the way to actually fix the plastic pollution problem (distinct from the plastic cleanup problem that TFA targets) is to identify the watersheds that produce 95% of the plastic, and then help them set up modern garbage handling at price points that those people can actually afford to use. They are very poor, which is why they're polluting in the first place. Also many of these watersheds are islands with few suitable landfill locations. Instead of talking about silly things like laws that should be passed in other nations, let's talk about how much aid will be required to actually fix this problem.
> I note that people in USA have chosen plastic packaging for many applications.
Because it's cheaper. Taxing it fixes that.
> more children dying of starvation.
Geez, use the taxes to subsidize the paper packaging. This isn't all that difficult to figure out.
https://www.kcet.org/redefine/6-reasons-that-floating-ocean-...
We need both actually. Stopping the manufacture of junk plastic will not cause the oceans to become cleaner. It will just stop them from getting worse. But in order to make the oceans cleaner, you need to actually remove the pollution that is in them.
Hence, we need to do both.
Investing in waste management infrastructure in the communities that live along the riverbanks would reap an immediate benefit to the people so affected, and stop pollution at the source.
* Being able to clean up environmental messes is more important than preventing them in the future, and they are not mutually exclusive.
* The quality of the recovered plastics is lower than conventional recycled plastics, but they are sold at a premium to brands who want environmental responsibility credit.
* Yes, we should prevent plastics from reaching the ocean by cleaning at the mouth of the contributing rivers - but the only reason we have identified these primary sources contributing to the ocean garbage problem is because of the research published by this same group.
I disagree with the first clause of this point. I think it's better to prevent environmental messes to begin with. Don't get me wrong, I'm not denigrating cleaning up messes, that's important too. We'd be fucked it we couldn't clean up after ourselves. But from my perspective, a moderate amount of effort in the present can spare having to spend a greater amount of effort in the future.
That said, I'm glad work is being done to clean plastics from the ocean, hope it continues, and hope it is successful.
Human activity is our planet's metabolism, and pollution is our accumulated cellular damage (age). To grow old, we must figure out how to repair damage, as it is impossible to entirely prevent aging, it is a natural and unavoidable consequence of our metabolism. So, we must learn to repair it.
I want to discuss this point. I think some people are reading this as "clean up >>>>> prevention", which I don't think is your point. Rather, your point is more along the lines of the Agile Manifesto (we value X over Y, doesn't mean we don't value Y).
Clean up is more important now because we've created a mess and can't simply discard it. In quality control (for companies) it is more important to improve quality (reduce messes, by analogy) because that reduces the amount of time spent in later rework (cleanup, in this analogy). However, companies have the option of discarding (deletion if it's digital, recycling or trashing if it's physical) their inventory. Deletion and recycling waste nothing but the time initially spent on it. Trashing, however, is an option for a company because they're not in a closed system. It may be expensive, but it is an option. They can close a poorly functioning facility, or a contaminated plot of land, and go down the street.
From an environmental standpoint, the planet is effectively a closed system. We can't ignore the messes that exist and just move down the street like a business might. We all need healthy oceans, healthy rivers, healthy lands. And we will run out of those things if we don't clean up the messes that presently exist.
Obviously, we still need to prevent more of them from happening. But clean up ought to be a higher priority (as a percentage of global effort) with reduction in waste and environmental impact happening simultaneously.
This is the most short sited perspective imaginable, yes cleanup is important, but we're adding to this disaster at an increasing rate. Additionally, new materials are more dangerous to the ecosystem then those already there, the existing materials have already leached their coatings and additives into the water and started to decompose, adding new plastics adds more chemicals and restarts the clock on the process of decomposition. Reducing the incoming plastics by some amount is more important then removing that same amount, and doesn't have the same risk of adding to the waste, which this project seriously does.
The quality of the recovered plastic is zero. It will be an unsortable mix of unusably degraded and potentially contaminated plastics, other buoyant waste matter and various organic material. This will not be something that anyone can use, it will need to be disposed of, which is a huge cost this project is ignoring.
Environmentalists and experts on the marine ecosystem have been trumpeting this problem for longer than Slat has been alive. The "research published by this same group" ignores the huge amount of previous research that has been conducted, and ignored the existing studies that showed the depth of the plastics reaches as far as 100m, putting any numbers they suggest into question.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/trevornace/2018/03/27/flat-eart...
Yet I find that whenever I mention this in Tech circles, it's like people don't even hear what I said, and just go back to beating the 'plastic is bad' drum. It's bizarre.
If you bring up the logistical, scientific and technical issues with the approach this project is taking, the response is "Well at least someone is doing something." It is so incredibly disrespectful to the countless people who have devoted their lives to studying and understanding these issues, ignoring that they have been trumpeting that this problem exists for decades and proposing changes that would help.
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/05/critics-say-plan-drif...
http://www.deepseanews.com/2016/06/the-ocean-cleanup-deploye...
https://www.pri.org/stories/2017-05-30/two-proposals-clean-o...
>Slat replies that there is not an either-or solution. “We need to do both,” he says. “We need to intercept plastic before it becomes ocean plastic. And we need to clean up what is out there.” Eriksen says that plastic on the high seas is mostly lost or discarded fishing gear. Fishermen could be paid or encouraged to collect it, which he says has worked reasonably well in the North Sea. The rest will eventually break down.
From your link. The last part is why we should get rid of it now, because it breaks down into the micro-plastics that marine life inevitably ends up consuming.
it could make large bundles/cubes of plastic material which could then be transported back to land by other ships.
The problem with any collection-based solution such as this or the one being discussed in the article, is that the scale of the infrastructure and associated transport, maintenance, and support systems, required to actually collect a meaningful amount of waste would be far more damaging to the environment then the plastic waste itself, and would very likely introduce more waste and pollution into the environment.
<checks size of Pacific ocean>
It's 50 year mission...
Saturday it launches from Alameda. It will pass under the Bay Bridge at 1pm and then pass infront of the SF water front. Finally, at 2pm it will pass under the Golden Gate to leave out to sea.
If anyone has a drone it'd be so cool if they could take a video of it sailing out.