Why the Ocean Cleanup hasn't solved the plastic pollution crisis

xnx

> The Ocean Cleanup didn’t work, for the reasons experts said it wouldn’t. What can we learn from this? Listen to experts. At least they recognize the "I told you so".

nexawave-ai

They may not have solved the problem, but at least they are doing something about it. In my opinion, that's better than doing nothing at all. I've seen firsthand how their solutions have been implemented and have had a positive impact on the environment. How often do we hear promises from NGOs or government entities claiming they will solve humanitarian issues such as housing shortages or hunger, only to fail miserably while spending billions of dollars in the process? Meanwhile, others grow rich from government tenders and contracts at the expense of the unfortunate beneficiaries.

msandford

The title of the article is kind of technically correct but still misleading. It is true that The Ocean Cleanup "we're going to trawl the ocean for plastic" approach isn't working terribly well. But they did pivot to stopping trash from washing out of rivers and into the ocean which is working. Stopping the mess from growing is also a very good thing. This seems like some combination of the enemy of good is perfect and also sour grapes that someone else is doing the thing.

jonahbenton

Sympathetic to other strategies but that writeup is wholly unconvincing. It comes across as astroturf.

21asdffdsa12

The plastic devouring bacteria breeding program is going very well. Typing this on a phone that dissolves as we speak. As if a million million-sided dice are thrown in unison, always landing on the six-up - a thousand times in a row to get through a labyrinth.

greenavocado

Sources of ocean plastic https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Global-emissions-of-plas...

nextstep

It’s capitalism. The market has determined that plastic in the ocean is the most efficient way to produce goods and services.

pelagicAustral

Sometimes is crazy how deluded people can be on all this safe the planet initiatives... All you have to do to figure out whos contributing the most with the whole plastic in the sea is go a beach and see what plastic do you see... maybe in a few hours walk you collect about 2 shopping bags of coke bottles, the other 2 tons you cant carry is all fishing industry discarded gear. Cleaning the ocean, yeah right... tackle the fishing industry first.

burnt-resistor

Ocean Cleanup is still hard at it cleaning major plastic emissions sources worldwide. I'm surprised they're still going and that they've managed to scale into different modalities of mass cleaning. Sure, it's not cleaning the world or placing consumer deposit on all plastic, but they're doing significant good.

ckemere

"The river interceptor design was clearly based on existing solutions" like Mr. Trash Wheel, Dr. Richards says. "Rather than work with the organizations who had successfully been removing trash from rivers for years, they ‘reinvented’ a similar design, at a much higher cost, and claimed to be innovators." This is a great summary of lots of flashy commercial and non-profit work. Proposal for a product: AI-assisted "Who is already doing this?" database. Extra credit for linking to audited annual reports.

zerof1l

Once plastic is in the middle of the ocean, it's game over. Much better to invest in reducing plastic use in the first place all those one-time-use plastics and invest in developing and improving recycling of the plastic. Germany, for example, has facilities that can automatically sort plastic both by type and color, which is quite impressive.

65

Ah right, so it would be far better if the Ocean Cleanup did not exist, technology were to not have been tested for cleaning up ocean plastic, and people would not have known about plastic in the ocean via the Ocean Cleanup's social media? Right, trust the experts, who appear to be more interested in their own expertise than people at least trying to do something, trying to create better technology, and trying to educate the public on plastic ocean waste. What's the point of this article again?

alex_c

I'm not arrogant enough to think I know more about this than an expert who's devoted their life to ocean research, but the article itself comes across as a list of grievances against the Ocean Cleanup project rather than an objective review - mostly due to emotionally charged language like "apparently killing enormous numbers of marine organisms" and "out there spewing diesel fumes from a ship that cost $100,000 a day" It took a bit of digging, but it looks like around 80% of the plastic the Ocean Cleanup has captured comes from rivers - while the article focuses mostly on criticizing the open ocean catch. It would be interesting to see what is the budget split between the two methods, but I couldn't easily find it. It makes sense to me that removal requiring infrastructure will be more costly than unpaid volunteers on land. It is NOT clear to me if that means the infrastructure solution is not worth pursuing in parallel. It does seem the open ocean catch is ineffective compared to the river capture, and I can understand that argument. Not so clear to me if / why river capture should be scrapped in favor of the volunteer beach cleanup, as the article seems to imply. Intuitively, pursuing both would makes more sense. Again, this would be a very interesting analysis to see. > Unfortunately, it also shows how some people can take certain ideas too closely to heart — and take it personally when those ideas are criticized. When experts started speaking out about the Ocean Cleanup several years ago, I witnessed several of them endure online harassment from supporters of the organization, often phrased as “At least they’re trying to do something to help, all you do is complain.” To be honest, yes, this article seems to be getting the same response. Doesn't mean the criticism is invalid, but public communication is a skill in itself, separate from depth of expertise in a subject.

1970-01-01

We have plastic that lasts a few years instead of hundreds. The pollution problem slowly solves itself if we just put in a bit of effort to ban the cheapest of the cheap plastics. The technology is here, we're just refusing to do anything.

latchkey

After living in Vietnam / Cambodia / Laos for 4 years, I came to the conclusion that there is no hope to the problem. It is literally in the local culture to just throw trash into the gutters. You can pick up as much as you want, but there will be 1000x more thrown into the rivers and flushed into the oceans. Changing the culture of people who are living moment-to-moment on absolutely nothing at all, isn't realistic either. Depressing AF, but far better to spend our time focused on other things than just trying to clean it up.

markkat

We need to tax non-degradable plastics for this externality. Also, I highly doubt this is from run-off of plastics carried to the sea. It's far more likely it's just being dumped. Probably much of it from people that thought it was getting recycled.

michael1999

This showed the same dynamics as most carbon-capture boondoggles. They can never work, and receive funding _because_ they distract from the core problems.

jayess

Ocean Cleanup always felt scammy to me. Just a feeling. The videos they released of the nets dropping tons of plastic trash onto the deck of a ship just seemed off. All of the plastic looked brand new. And knowing that the "great garbage patch" is really just a bunch of microplastics also screamed fake to me.

ricardobeat

Strangely negative piece. They switched focus to collecting plastic at river mouths, as the article mentions near the end, around 2019. That is seven years ago. That strategy does not harm sea life and has been very successful collecting 40 million kilos of plastic so far. Their only activity in the ocean is in the 'great pacific garbage patch' - what % of that surface dwelling sealife lives in this exact spot? The article doesn't actually go into the environmental impact.

SamBam

> That criticism and feedback haven’t dissuaded The Ocean Cleanup [One paragraph later] > the team pivoted in 2019 toward a new model that was first suggested by critics and skeptics as an alternative in 2015. So.... It did dissuade them away from their original vision and towards something suggested by critics and experts. I hate it when people cite someone changing their mind about something as a gotcha or a fault. So they switched towards a better direction seven years ago! But the rest of the article is still about how terrible the old idea was, and how it proves that people have an "only I can fix it mentality," when it actually proves the exact opposite! > their picture shows HUNDREDS of floating animals trapped with the plastic. I'm curious to know how many animals die from the plastic. This article seems to think that any deaths caused by cleanup are reason to stop. Just like people who point to dead birds as reasons to ban wind turbines, despite far more wildlife being at risk from a warming planet. It's quite possible that ocean cleanup efforts do more damage, I don't know, but the article doesn't even try to grapple with quantifying it. It's just a fear-mongering screed.