Great Pacific Garbage Patch: Can Ocean Cleanup remove ocean plastic?

Boyan Slat on the day of
the first system’s launch.
Kevin
Loria/Business Insider

• On September 8th, the Ocean
  Cleanup launched the first of many massive
  plastic-cleaning arrays into the Pacific Ocean.
• There’s a lot of plastic in the world’s oceans, with much of
  it congregating in places like the Great
  Pacific Garbage Patch.
• Dutch innovator Boyan
  Slat came up with the idea for these systems, which he
  hopes can scoop plastic out of water.
• But there are big questions, including whether the systems
  will survive the ocean’s forces, harm marine life, and collect
  plastic.
• This is the first time the systems are really being put to
  the test — if they work, they could be part of a solution to a
  massive problem.

It was 11 p.m. on Boyan Slat’s birthday when he realized he had a
problem.

“We were having this barbecue [at the office],” he told Business
Insider. Because of that, most of Slat’s team was still available
when the call came in. There was an urgent structural problem
with the giant plastic-cleaning device that the team had been
working on.

Slat, who turned 24 on July 27th, is the creator
of the Ocean Cleanup, an organization attempting to remove
plastic from some of the most trash-filled areas of the ocean,
starting with a region so full of debris that it’s referred to as
the
Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Slat and his team of
scientists and engineers have designed — and redesigned — massive
floating cleaning arrays that will theoretically help trap
plastic debris floating near the surface.

With the launch of the first 2,000-foot array scheduled for
September 8th, the Ocean Cleanup’s test was just over a month
away.

But the call that came in on the night of July 27th meant that a
serious issue had to be quickly solved.

The plastic-cleaning system is made of sections of large durable
floating plastic pipe, with a 10-foot barrier underneath it to
trap debris. To stop that system from rolling, especially when
facing intense seas like those in the Pacific, steel stabilizers
had been added to the design. While working on assembly, the team
realized these stabilizers were crushing the rubber components
that helped hold everything together.

Over the next five days, the team adjusted the design at the
shipyard in Alameda, California, where the cleanup array was
being built.

The actual assembly wasn’t finished until a week before the
launch.

Then, under the bright sun on September 8th, a supply ship and
offshore tug called the Maersk Launcher towed the cleanup
system out under the Golden Gate Bridge towards the Pacific.

A first test with serious implications

Slat’s system will soon face its first true test: seeing
whether it can maintain structure and stability while still
moving in the open sea.

But removing ocean plastic is a complex enough problem that
scientists
question whether or not it’s possible to do efficiently
or safely at all.

The stakes are high — there’s a mind-boggling amount of plastic
in the world’s oceans. So far, no one knows if the Ocean Cleanup
array will effectively capture much plastic, and if something
goes wrong, the floating array could cause harm. Some scientists
fear that as a large, floating structure, it will attract marine
life that could then ingest plastic or be caught up in the mess.
Some fear it could also be broken up by a storm and contribute to
the problem. 

Perhaps the biggest question: If it does work, can it collect the
massive amounts of plastic necessary to make a dent in the ocean
plastic problem?

Plastic collected on a
scouting expedition by the Ocean Cleanup.
The Ocean Cleanup

It’s in the water — will it work?

On September 8th, Slat’s organization began the journey out to
sea with its first official 2,000-foot-long plastic cleaning
array, System 001, named “Wilson” after Tom Hanks’ volleyball
friend in the movie “Castaway.”

The Maersk Launcher’s first stop for the system is a testing site
about 240 miles offshore. The Ocean Cleanup crew traveling with
the array plans to spend two weeks there. 

In order to collect plastic, the long tube system will be pulled
into a U-shape that will theoretically be able to move faster
than drifting plastic, catching large quantities inside the U.

At the testing area, the team will pull the system into the
U-shape for the first time to see if it can maintain structural
integrity, watch how it moves, and see if it can turn in case the
ocean spins it a different direction. If all goes well, the
system — which will face storms and waves that can regularly top
40 feet — will be dragged another 1,200 nautical miles to the

garbage patch.

Once at the patch, Slat and colleagues hope the system can
collect up to 50 metric tons of plastic in its first year — a
little more than three garbage trucks-full.

Over the past several years, the Cleanup group has redesigned the
contraption several times. In the current system, a tapered wall
that reaches 10 feet down at the middle is supposed to help
corral plastic until a boat can pick it up every six weeks to a
couple months.

“I’m confident that we’ve been able to eliminate all the risks
that we can eliminate before actually launching the system,” Slat
said.

The system being towed out
to sea.
The Ocean Cleanup / Pierre
Augier

A mind-boggling problem

We don’t have a perfect picture of how much plastic is in the
ocean, or how much pours into it every year. We do know it’s a
stunning quantity.

A lot of garbage washes back to shore, as beachgoers and
viewers of certain viral
videos noticed earlier
this summer, but a good amount of plastic eventually drifts into
one of five massive ocean regions called gyres. Enough plastic
converges in these regions that many refer to them as “garbage
patches.”

The area targeted by The Ocean Cleanup is called the Great
Pacific Garbage Patch. It’s the best-known of these regions and
is often
referred to as the largest
gyre, though the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration says there’s
no reliable measurement of the size of any of these
patches.

More than 320 million metric tons of plastic are produced every
year. “Our
current estimates are that at least 8 million metric tons of
plastic get into the ocean every year, which is the equivalent of
one city garbage truck of plastic getting dumped into the ocean
every minute,” said Emily Woglom, the vice president for
conservation policy and programs at the Ocean Conservancy. That’s
a low estimate, because it counts only waste from shore and not
items like fishing nets discarded at sea.

The Ocean Cleanup researchers have studied the garbage patch and
estimated there are at least 1.8 trillion pieces of
plastic in the region, weighing 79,000 metric tons. According to
the group’s research, 1.7 trillion pieces are tiny microplastics,
but more than 90% of the overall plastic mass comes from larger
pieces of plastic — frequently from lost fishing nets — that has
yet to break down into smaller pieces.

All this plastic affects at least 800 marine species, according
to Woglom. It gets into the food chain, strangles animals like
turtles and seals, is eaten by whales and albatrosses that starve
with stomachs full of indigestible trash, and breaks down into
tiny pieces that are devoured by fish. Ocean fish that humans eat
have plastic in them. 

Yet there’s still debate about where exactly the plastic is. Some
scientists believe most of it is already too broken down and
distributed throughout the ocean for it to be worth skimming
what’s accessible at the surface, as the Ocean Cleanup is
attempting.

Eben Schwartz, marine debris program manager for the California
Coastal Commission,
told National Geographic that only about 3% of what enters
the oceans is eventually found on the surface of the gyres.

Slat points out that the Ocean Cleanup’s research expedition
found most plastic in the gyres to be close to the surface. Some
plastics are more likely to sink from the start, but that’s not
what the cleanup arrays are focused on.

“Once it’s out there, it doesn’t go away by itself,” Slat said.
“It has to be cleaned up and it gets more harmful over time,”
since it does continue to break down into smaller plastics.

Eventually, the expedition may reveal more about where plastic
does settle in the water, said Laurent Lebreton, lead
oceanographer with the Ocean Cleanup. In an upcoming mission, the
team plans to sample water down to the seabed, both to figure out
where in the water column plastic is most common and where it
comes from.

This is the screen that’s
supposed to help collect plastic.
The
Ocean Cleanup

Some scientists are skeptical

While Slat’s plan is widely considered inspiring — check
out the comments on any story about the project — a number of
scientists have raised questions about the initiative.

Some of these questions are the same ones posed by Slat and his
colleagues, including whether the system can collect plastic and
survive the forces of the Pacific. As a large plastic structure
itself, it could get broken up and become a lot more ocean
plastic debris, oceanographer Kara Lavender Law of the Sea
Education Association
told Wired. Plus, it could gradually shed more plastic
particles into the ocean over time, she said.

A survey
of 15 experts in ocean plastic pollution found that
many were concerned the system would attract and kill marine
life. Even though the Cleanup has tweaked its designs to help
deal with these problems — it’s just a solid wall corralling
plastic now, not any sort of netting that could entangle animals
— animals will still be drawn to a floating mass and may end up
entangled in the debris.

The Ocean Cleanup has conducted an
Environmental Impact Assessment, responded
to concerns, and made changes to the system. The group has
also said it’s willing to redesign the system as needed.

“As with any novel technology, success is not guaranteed, but
this is exactly why we test, test, and test again. Until the
final risks and uncertainties have been mitigated, System 001 is
still labeled a ‘beta system,'” a representative for the group
told Business Insider.

“I do think that as the Cleanup goes forward we need to make sure
that there’s close monitoring and that the Cleanup folks are
transparent about the effectiveness as well as any unintended
impacts on marine species or navigation,” said Woglom of the
Ocean Conservancy. “I think it’s going to be really interesting
to see how it plays out.”

Kevin Loria/Business Insider

Stopping plastic from entering the oceans is still the key

Even if the Ocean Cleanup system works and can stand the forces
of the sea, scaling it up to the point that it can remove a
significant proportion of plastic will be a massive challenge.

The Cleanup estimates that a full deployment of 60 systems, some
larger than the first one, could remove 50% of plastic currently
in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch within five years. That
depends on everything working perfectly and on continuous funding
— two things that are far from guaranteed. And of course, more
plastic continues to flow into the water as time goes on.

Designing and building the first system cost about $23 million,
though Slat estimates future systems could be built for under $6
million. The Ocean Cleanup plans to make and sell products out of
the collected ocean plastic in order to raise money, and the
group hopes companies and charities fund and create their own
future cleanup arrays.

So far, the project’s funding has almost exclusively come from
individuals, including big donors like Salesforce founder Marc
Benioff and entrepreneur Peter Thiel.

“If we have all the money in the world, that’s fantastic, let’s
do it, but I’m encouraged that that is not the only solution
being pursued,” said Woglom.

Other existing efforts focus more on stopping plastic from
flowing into the ocean altogether. The Ocean Conservancy
organizes an
annual volunteer effort to pick up trash from beaches (the
next one is September 15th). In 2017, volunteers collected 9,000
tons of trash. It would take a lot of cleanup arrays to gather a
similar quantity.

Some groups also collect garbage at waterways. Baltimore
has trash-collecting
water wheels that have trapped more than 900 tons of
trash in the Inner Harbor since May 2014.

Slat knows that cleaning up the garbage patch is not the only
solution to our plastic problem. He also thinks that
stopping plastic from getting to the gyres in the first place
will require big technological leaps forward.

Right now, Slat believes, we have a chance to take a shot at
plastic in the garbage patch itself — something that no one else
is trying. 

“If we do fail, I think there would be a risk that [a gyre
cleanup] will not happen for a very long time,” he said.

“Everybody wants there to be one simple thing we can do, and then
everybody fights about whether or not their thing is the thing,”
said Woglom. “And the truth is, that just like climate and just
like any global environmental challenge, we’re going to have to
work across a range of strategies.”