This has been an interesting discussion but I am surprised at the high level of criticism towards the project.
There seems to be two primary critiques of the project:
1. This should not be an area of focus - There are better climate change opportunities to put money towards
2. The project is ineffective and introduces a lot of other environmental problems
For the first point it seems like people are arguing as if it is a binary problem. It isn’t - The threat of climate change / environmental damage is an incredibly complex one that will not be fixed by a single technology / focus/ policy change. For me the questions are a. ’Are existing plastics in our ocean a problem? (yes) b. If someone is passionate about this should they have a crack at improving things? (yes) This is not consuming all the worlds available financing for environmental action so I don’t think wasted resourcing is a particularly good argument. Several commentators also talk about focusing on other ‘lower’ hanging fruit but this is not an objective measure - For a team made up of excellent engineers, oceanographers, fluid dynamics experts etc this may be a lower hanging fruit than trying to implement large scale policy change.
For the second point it comes down to the motivations of the team and their capacity and capability to improve the product. I would presume the team are incredibly passionate about improving the environment and so things like danger to floating marine life, use of diesel in boats etc would absolutely be something they are aware of and actively looking to mitigate. The fact this is (at least) the third iteration demonstrates they are working to improve on what they know is a currently flawed solution - This is development cycle!
This is not to say that critique is bad. Hopefully the team are humble enough to absorb the critique and continue to iterate on their solution to resolve the real issues raised but as long as there is a continued focus on the goal of environmental cleanup and good governance surrounding this I think this is a fantastic project and hopefully it is joined by many more ambitious activities.
I would add that people have noted that the Pacific Garbage Patch is large and has a low density of plastic. I assume that ocean also has a relatively low density of fish altogether but industrial fishing is able to catch a pretty large proportion of these at this point (with beneficial and problem consequences). With plastic not trying to flee and fish moving, it doesn't seems a-priori impossible to create a device that would just skim a large portion of the plastic off.
Of course, unless the world's nation change their policies, this will be moot and environmental destruction generally will accelerate given our present politics. But shitting on this particular project hardly seems a useful way to force this absolutely necessary general change.
Here's a guy who saw a problem. Decided to go out and do something about the problem. Raised money from sponsorships and donations. Did something about the problem.
Thank you for writing this. You've worded it a lot better and more cordial than I could have as I'm really astonished by the level of ignorance in this thread.
Have we got a clever word for rejecting one cause in favor of another? ”Whataboutism“ seems to miss the mark here.
The world is a big place, there are a lot of things that contribute to problems. I dunno why so many people think there is one way to solve them, or that pursuit of that priority should obviate all others.
For one, what if you’re wrong? If you haven’t hedged your bets you have to start from scratch, maybe undo what you’ve done first. Big problems require many solutions, not big solutions.
I mean, I don’t personally see how they’ll ever get the numbers to work, but you can’t have a marketplace for ideas and then evict everyone. There are some ideas that are similar to these that seem to actually work already, like the giant mesh bags over drain pipes. Who knows where inspiration will come from.
> This should not be an area of focus - There are better climate change opportunities to put money towards
People who put money should decide the area of focus. Not others.
> The project is ineffective and introduces a lot of other environmental problems
This achievement matters and useful in itself. May be they can figure it out how to scale or will find more commercially viable products from this sort of technology.
Unfortunately the approaches taken by Ocean Cleanup make no sense. What Ocean Cleanup is doing isn't new, they're trying strategies that have previously been tried and found to be uneconomical/ineffective. This startup has received a lot of flak from experts for a reason: they're big on hype but haven't produced any results. Sending big diesel powered boats into the sea to collect a few thousand pounds of plastic is a joke.
If the goal is to capture a gigantic amount of plastic cheaply, just place nets where polluted rivers in southeast Asia meet the sea. Those rivers carry all the plastic waste from the cities to the sea, so that's where the focus should be. But cleaning the rivers in poor parts of the world isn't a sexy hi-tech problem that results in TED talks. So Ocean Cleanup will continue to make more solar-powered autonomous boondoggles and they will accomplish nothing.
...Which is why they built the interceptor which grabs plastic exactly at the source. As their CEO argues, you need to do both. Remove legacy ocean garbage and prevent newer garbage as well.
If we stopped producing all plastic right now, the oceans would still be full of plastic. Even if we treat the source we'll still need to clean up. The damage has already been done. It won't go away on it's own over time.
In a mission to clean up trash floating in the ocean, environmentalists pulled 40 tons (36 metric tons) of abandoned fishing nets this month from an area known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
These comments are full of arguments where one person suggests a course of action and another person replies that the alternatives are worse (plastic vs paper, wild fish vs farmed, cleaning up plastic vs cutting carbon). It's impossible for anyone to fully foresee the environmental consequences of the products they buy. This is the reason why the only solutions to these problems is for our governments to impose Pigovian taxes for harms to the environment (and equal subsidies for helps to the environment). Then all the consequences of our choices filter back to us in monetary terms. No other method is capable of weighing all the different factors.
I think that article is based on outdated information. More recently people have started to look at plastic released on the open sea through fishing, and found it to be bigger than all land-based sources.
EG, It might be more effective to catch the plastic at source, and put these barriers on river mouths. Especially in Asia, which seems to be aa major 'contributor'.
Though perhaps there's also a 'great Atlantic garbage patch'
I got this link from a Twitter thread last fall: https://twitter.com/RebeccaRHelm/status/1179861389575245824 The Ocean Cleanup folks responded (there's a link in the thread), and the author who raised concerns responded in turn (also linked). To my eye, it seems like there are some pretty wide open scientific questions about the impacted ecosystems, and I'm not at all convinced that the Ocean Cleanup folks have demonstrated sufficient care about those uncertainties and concerns.
Since the plastic is breaking down (these patches would disappear without supply) and I guess you yourself also doesn't want to pollute the ocean with new plastic not sure why is this an issue.
Or do you suggest to continue to pollute the ocean?
I think it might be useful for governments globally to try to tackle these international problems. We all suffer from plastic in the ocean so its in everyone's interest to stop it.
Yes the same startup is trying to collect trash at the mouths of rivers. But even that is not far enough upstream. The problem must be tackled before the trash gets into the river. But how do you convince a developing country to invest in waste disposal infrastructure that has no economic benefit to them? Politics is much harder than tech.
This startup might as well be funded by the petroleum industry. If they can convince the lay person that "we're on it" ie that someone else is solving the plastic issue, and individual consumers can go back to using as much plastic as they wish, it will be a terrific investment.
Contrary to public perception, landfills are the most environmentally friendly way to dispose of most types of garbage. The challenge is to get the garbage to the landfill.
Meaningless without metrics such as energy cost per kg removed, etc. Do we have adequate means to reuse or dispose of the waste acquired? Does it have value that improves the metrics, or are there additional costs once the boat comes in? This technology is more useful once we have eliminated the waste SUPPLY, I suspect.
Is there evidence for that? I've seen people claim this, but I haven't seen any supporting evidence for it.
The ocean is big. At the moment, the ocean cleanup is still small. I'd suggest investigating the impact, rather than claiming there is impact without evidence. If it turns out the cure (cleanup) is worse than the disease (plastic), then it makes sense to stop the ocean cleanup. Until then, let's continue and see what this will accomplish.
We need a law that bans all single use plastic. We should only allow one or two forms of plastic that are guaranteed recyclable and make everything else compostable.
I don't think we need a full ban. The problem is plastic is so damn effective and sooo damn cheap. And that countries in certain parts of the world basically dump straight into the ocean. If all the plastics just go to landfill, they're really not a problem. We have sufficient unused terra firma to store millennia worth of plastic. Space is not an issue, collection is. And that's pretty hard to solve in the long tail of developing nations.
The article and the press release has no numbers, so it's difficult to estimate how much miroplastic they got. My guess is that the holes in the net are too big to catch microplastic unless it gets stranded with other bigger plastic of plants.
Also, this sentence of the article doesn't make sense:
> The system's success in capturing microplastics came as a welcome surprise since microplastics tend to fall to the ocean floor rather than float on the surface, according to the press release. Since microplasitcs tend to sink, Ocean Cleanup focused on large pieces of plastic.
The plastic float or sink according to it's density, not it's size.
[+] [-] mrtrombone|6 years ago|reply
1. This should not be an area of focus - There are better climate change opportunities to put money towards
2. The project is ineffective and introduces a lot of other environmental problems
For the first point it seems like people are arguing as if it is a binary problem. It isn’t - The threat of climate change / environmental damage is an incredibly complex one that will not be fixed by a single technology / focus/ policy change. For me the questions are a. ’Are existing plastics in our ocean a problem? (yes) b. If someone is passionate about this should they have a crack at improving things? (yes) This is not consuming all the worlds available financing for environmental action so I don’t think wasted resourcing is a particularly good argument. Several commentators also talk about focusing on other ‘lower’ hanging fruit but this is not an objective measure - For a team made up of excellent engineers, oceanographers, fluid dynamics experts etc this may be a lower hanging fruit than trying to implement large scale policy change.
For the second point it comes down to the motivations of the team and their capacity and capability to improve the product. I would presume the team are incredibly passionate about improving the environment and so things like danger to floating marine life, use of diesel in boats etc would absolutely be something they are aware of and actively looking to mitigate. The fact this is (at least) the third iteration demonstrates they are working to improve on what they know is a currently flawed solution - This is development cycle!
This is not to say that critique is bad. Hopefully the team are humble enough to absorb the critique and continue to iterate on their solution to resolve the real issues raised but as long as there is a continued focus on the goal of environmental cleanup and good governance surrounding this I think this is a fantastic project and hopefully it is joined by many more ambitious activities.
[+] [-] joe_the_user|6 years ago|reply
Of course, unless the world's nation change their policies, this will be moot and environmental destruction generally will accelerate given our present politics. But shitting on this particular project hardly seems a useful way to force this absolutely necessary general change.
[+] [-] keanzu|6 years ago|reply
Hard to see what's not to like.
[+] [-] hanniabu|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] istjohn|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hinkley|6 years ago|reply
The world is a big place, there are a lot of things that contribute to problems. I dunno why so many people think there is one way to solve them, or that pursuit of that priority should obviate all others.
For one, what if you’re wrong? If you haven’t hedged your bets you have to start from scratch, maybe undo what you’ve done first. Big problems require many solutions, not big solutions.
I mean, I don’t personally see how they’ll ever get the numbers to work, but you can’t have a marketplace for ideas and then evict everyone. There are some ideas that are similar to these that seem to actually work already, like the giant mesh bags over drain pipes. Who knows where inspiration will come from.
[+] [-] Sangama34|6 years ago|reply
People who put money should decide the area of focus. Not others.
> The project is ineffective and introduces a lot of other environmental problems
This achievement matters and useful in itself. May be they can figure it out how to scale or will find more commercially viable products from this sort of technology.
[+] [-] gizmo|6 years ago|reply
If the goal is to capture a gigantic amount of plastic cheaply, just place nets where polluted rivers in southeast Asia meet the sea. Those rivers carry all the plastic waste from the cities to the sea, so that's where the focus should be. But cleaning the rivers in poor parts of the world isn't a sexy hi-tech problem that results in TED talks. So Ocean Cleanup will continue to make more solar-powered autonomous boondoggles and they will accomplish nothing.
[+] [-] mikkelam|6 years ago|reply
https://theoceancleanup.com/rivers/
[+] [-] ehnto|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] keanzu|6 years ago|reply
In a mission to clean up trash floating in the ocean, environmentalists pulled 40 tons (36 metric tons) of abandoned fishing nets this month from an area known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
https://www.voanews.com/science-health/40-tons-fishing-nets-...
40 tons in a month by an NGO funded by donations and sponsors.
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] OscarCunningham|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hourislate|6 years ago|reply
https://www.dw.com/en/almost-all-plastic-in-the-ocean-comes-...
[+] [-] comicjk|6 years ago|reply
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/nov/06/dumped-f...
[+] [-] mostlyjason|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] keanzu|6 years ago|reply
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-22939-w
[+] [-] spaceandshit|6 years ago|reply
https://youtu.be/whRVyywTov4
[+] [-] lsh|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacknews|6 years ago|reply
EG, It might be more effective to catch the plastic at source, and put these barriers on river mouths. Especially in Asia, which seems to be aa major 'contributor'. Though perhaps there's also a 'great Atlantic garbage patch'
[+] [-] esotericn|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arkitaip|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Steuard|6 years ago|reply
I got this link from a Twitter thread last fall: https://twitter.com/RebeccaRHelm/status/1179861389575245824 The Ocean Cleanup folks responded (there's a link in the thread), and the author who raised concerns responded in turn (also linked). To my eye, it seems like there are some pretty wide open scientific questions about the impacted ecosystems, and I'm not at all convinced that the Ocean Cleanup folks have demonstrated sufficient care about those uncertainties and concerns.
[+] [-] radicsge|6 years ago|reply
Or do you suggest to continue to pollute the ocean?
[+] [-] trekrich|6 years ago|reply
https://www.forbes.com/sites/hannahleung/2018/04/21/five-asi...
more focus needs to be placed here. Everyone can do their bit. But they need to do more.
[+] [-] newguy1234|6 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyZArQMFhQ4
[+] [-] Polylactic_acid|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Reedx|6 years ago|reply
As long as there are are literal dump trucks of trash being emptied straight into rivers...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeDY3I841q0
...it feels like we're spinning our wheels in almost comical fashion.
[+] [-] bagacrap|6 years ago|reply
This startup might as well be funded by the petroleum industry. If they can convince the lay person that "we're on it" ie that someone else is solving the plastic issue, and individual consumers can go back to using as much plastic as they wish, it will be a terrific investment.
[+] [-] Aunche|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gizmo|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bagacrap|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ggregoire|6 years ago|reply
https://theoceancleanup.com/rivers
[+] [-] aj7|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] radicsge|6 years ago|reply
The plastic is breaking down to the size that is impossible to capture. This project is needed yesterday already.
[+] [-] philshem|6 years ago|reply
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/02/04/a-grand-plan-t...
[+] [-] popopje|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ourlordcaffeine|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mcv|6 years ago|reply
The ocean is big. At the moment, the ocean cleanup is still small. I'd suggest investigating the impact, rather than claiming there is impact without evidence. If it turns out the cure (cleanup) is worse than the disease (plastic), then it makes sense to stop the ocean cleanup. Until then, let's continue and see what this will accomplish.
[+] [-] titzer|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _0ffh|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] remote_phone|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bagacrap|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] egdod|6 years ago|reply
The first one would be comparatively easy but would do almost no good. The second one would actually help, if it weren’t impossible, but it is.
[+] [-] arkitaip|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gus_massa|6 years ago|reply
Also, this sentence of the article doesn't make sense:
> The system's success in capturing microplastics came as a welcome surprise since microplastics tend to fall to the ocean floor rather than float on the surface, according to the press release. Since microplasitcs tend to sink, Ocean Cleanup focused on large pieces of plastic.
The plastic float or sink according to it's density, not it's size.
[+] [-] JetBen|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ykevinator|6 years ago|reply