A Grand Plan to Clean the Great Pacific Garbage Patch

Can a controversial young entrepreneur rid the ocean of plastic trash? In May, 2017, a twenty-two-year-old Dutch entrepreneur named Boyan Slat unveiled a contraption that he believed would rid the oceans of plastic. In a former factory in Utrecht, a crowd of twelve hundred people stood before a raised stage. The setting was futuristic and hip.

 Ocean Cleanup Project Finally Collects Plastic From Great Pacific Garbage Patch

That giant pile of plastic trash in the ocean just got a little smaller. Dutch inventor Boyan Slat's Ocean Cleanup project recently collected its first plastic from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

 The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is gobbling up ever more plastic

There’s even more plastic in the Pacific than we thought. At least 79,000 tonnes of plastic are floating in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. That’s four to sixteen times as much as was estimated by two studies in 2014. The Garbage Patch is an area of 1.6 million square kilometres between Hawaii and California. There, floating debris – from microscopic particles of plastic to large pieces like ropes and fishing nets – is carried by currents and accumulates. Similar patches exist in other oceans.

 The ‘Great Pacific Garbage Patch’ Is Ballooning, 87,000 Tons of Plastic and Counting

In recent years, this notorious mess has become known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a swirling oceanic graveyard where everyday objects get deposited by the currents. The plastics eventually disintegrate into tiny particles that often get eaten by fish and may ultimately enter our food chain.

 We Were Missing Most of the Plastic in the Ocean

The highest levels of microplastics are found more than 650 feet below the surface.

How Plastic Cleanup Threatens the Ocean’s Living Islands

When I learned about the Ocean Cleanup project’s 600-meter-long barrier with a three-meter-deep net, a wall being placed in the open ocean, ostensibly to collect plastic passively as the currents push water through the net, I thought immediately of the neuston. How will it be impacted? But in the 146 pages of the Ocean Cleanup’s environmental-impact assessment, this ecosystem isn’t mentioned once.

Meet the guy swimming through the Great Pacific Garbage Patch

In June, the athlete and environmental advocate embarked on a swim through a highly polluted stretch between Hawaii and California. By September, he hopes to traverse 300 nautical miles of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the world’s largest accumulation of marine plastic debris. It’s an area that’s not well understood, despite recent media attention to the growing problem of plastic waste.

The great Pacific garbage patch is even trashier than we thought

Plastic is everywhere, from our homes and everyday lives all the way up to the illusorily pristine Arctic. The oceans are no exception—our high seas are accumulating plastic just as fast as we can push it out into the world.

What's Next? Great Pacific Garbage Patch Dolls

As governments and NGO’s scramble to find a solution to the dumping of plastic polymers in our oceans, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch continues to grow to a size rivaling one of the earth’s continents - Shilo Zylbergold

Every single ocean has a massive swirling plastic garbage patch

These garbage patches aren't visible from space — or even, necessarily, from a passing boat — since most of the plastic is bobbing just beneath the surface, and most of the particles are smaller than 1 centimeter in diameter. Over time, the plastic bits get broken down into ever smaller pieces as they get battered by waves and degraded by the sun. But these garbage patches are massive, collectively holding some 7,000 to 35,000 tons of plastic in all. The patch in the North Pacific was by far the biggest — containing about one-third of all the floating plastic found. (Much of the plastic debris from eastern China, for instance, collects here.)

Evidence that the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is rapidly accumulating plastic

Ocean plastic can persist in sea surface waters, eventually accumulating in remote areas of the world’s oceans. Here we characterise and quantify a major ocean plastic accumulation zone formed in subtropical waters between California and Hawaii: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch (GPGP).

Ocean Cleanup's Plastic Catcher Is Busted. So What Now?

To many ocean scientists, this isn’t in the least bit surprising. As we’ve reported, researchers have been warning that first of all, the sea will easily demolish a 600-meter-long plastic tube. Two, the device could imperil sea life. Three, it wouldn’t make a dent in the ocean plastic problem anyway, given that only a fraction of the trash is floating at the surface. And four, even if Ocean Cleanup’s plan did somehow work, this isn’t the way to go about fixing the mess we’ve unleashed on the seas.

Sea Trash

I keep reading about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, that floating island of trash between California and Hawaii. Can we ever clean it up? And should we even bother?

The giant garbage vortex in the Pacific Ocean is over twice the size of Texas — here's what it looks like

There's far too much plastic in the world's oceans, and the problem continues to build up. Every little bit of plastic that gets tossed into the ocean or swept downstream out to sea either sinks or is picked up by currents. Much of it is eventually carried into one of five massive ocean regions, where plastic can be so concentrated that areas have garnered names like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

The Ocean Cleanup Project And The Ocean Plastic Crisis: What Investors Can Learn From Failing Fast

For a project that sounded too good to be true, perhaps we should not have been so surprised that it didn’t work immediately. After all, waste is a looming international crisis and the Ocean Conservancy estimates that a garbage truck load of plastic enters the ocean every minute and that more than $5b of new recycling and waste infrastructure is needed to address the problem.

The world’s plastic problem is bigger than the ocean

As you read this, a strange object that looks like a 2,000-foot floating pool noodle is drifting slowly through the central north Pacific Ocean. This object is designed to solve an enormous environmental problem. But in so doing, it brings attention to a number of others. There are an estimated five trillion pieces of plastic floating on and in the world’s oceans. The massive pool noodle will move through the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, driven by the wind and currents and picking up the plastic it encounters along the way. Ocean Cleanup, the organization that developed the device, promises “the largest cleanup in history.”

Which Countries Create the Most Ocean Trash?

China and Indonesia are likely the top sources of plastic reaching the oceans, accounting for more than a third of the plastic bottles, bags and other detritus washed out to sea, an international research team of environmental scientists reported Thursday.