Great Pacific Garbage Patch cleanup array to launch in Pacific Ocean

Boyan
Slat sits in a floater segment of the first cleanup
system.
The Ocean
Cleanup

• There’s a mind-boggling amount of trash in the world’s
  oceans, with much of it collected in five regions known as
  gyres.
• On September 8, a group called The Ocean Cleanup plans
  to deploy a plastic clean-up system to the largest of those
  gyres, known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
• The system was designed by 24-year-old Dutch innovator
  Boyan Slat.
• A number of experts argue that the clean-up system
  won’t work and will do more harm than good.
• The best solution might be stopping plastic before it
  gets into the water.

On September 8, a massive and controversial plastic-cleaning
system will
be launched into the Pacific Ocean.

The goal of the system, created by The Ocean Cleanup, a nonprofit
organization founded in 2013 by 24-year-old Dutch innovator Boyan
Slat, is to remove plastic debris from the now-famous marine area

known as the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch.” Located in
the North
Pacific Ocean, it’s actually less of a patch and more like a
swirling vortex over three times the size of Spain and more than
twice the size of Turkey or Texas.

By 2050, the amount of plastic in the oceans is
expected to outweigh fish. That garbage kills marine life,
destroys ecosystems that people depend on to live, and even makes
its way into the food supply, causing fish to
absorb chemicals that contaminate the seafood we consume.

But while dealing with plastic pollution is urgent, a number of

experts say that The Ocean Cleanup’s plans are unlikely to be
effective, and could potentially cause more harm than benefit.

Last year,
Slat told Business Insider that he believes their cleanup
arrays will allow the group to “clean up 50% of the patch in five
years,” once they are fully deployed.

The system will eventually consist of at least 60 arrays, and the
group is inviting corporations and private groups to sponsor
their own arrays as well.

“Our goal is to have a full-scale operation running by 2020,” a
spokesperson from The Ocean Cleanup said via email.

The Ocean Cleanup

Ocean Cleanup’s ambitious, shifting solution

It’s unlikely that massive floating devices can clean up a
significant amount of plastic without causing harm to marine life
and potentially adding more garbage to the situation, according
to a survey of 15
ocean plastic experts by shark researcher David
Shiffman.

Most of those experts had serious concerns about The Ocean
Cleanup project.

Over the years, The
Ocean Cleanup’s plans have changed dramatically. Slat’s
original concept involved mooring a massive plastic-collecting
trap to the seabed almost three miles below — something
many scientists said was unlikely to be possible. One massive
multi-mile trap evolved to become a series of smaller, long
u-shaped floating arrays. These were designed with underwater
anchors that would allow them to move slowly through the water,
so faster moving plastic would run into the arrays and get
trapped by underwater screens.

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

The Ocean Cleanup researchers have estimated that there are
at least 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic in the water, weighing
79,000 metric tons. According to their research, 1.7 trillion of
the 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 these smaller pieces.

New plastic debris is constantly streaming into the oceans from
coastlines, with much of it eventually arriving at one of these
five gyres. Along the way, plastic breaks down into smaller and
smaller pieces. The Ocean Cleanup’s team is mainly focused on
larger pieces of plastic near the surface.

“The plastic that reaches the patch all the way from land is of
certain density and buoyancy. This plastic is floating within the
top few meters of the water column, as found in our vertical
distribution research,” said the spokesperson.

Some researchers who have studied the problem say most of the
plastic in the region is already broken down and found deeper
underwater. That would make cleaning the plastic out of water a
far more complex task, if it’s possible at all.

“To make the claim, as The Ocean Cleanup Project is, that they
will ‘clean the oceans’ by 2040 or whenever, is disingenuous and
misleading, when it will, at best, clean a very small percentage
of what’s found on the surface,” Eben Schwartz, the Marine Debris
Program Manager at the California Coastal Commission, told
Shiffman.

The Ocean Cleanup

Major questions about safety

Some researchers also worry that a large floating system will
aggregate marine life, which may feed off the plastic and get
trapped in the debris.

The Ocean Cleanup says it’s designed the system to move slowly,
giving creatures time to swim away — and that since the screen is
impenetrable, it can’t trap creatures like a net. The current
should flow under the screen, carrying drifting organisms below
it.

Plastic will only be removed periodically, and people will always
check for marine life before the plastic is removed, according to
the organization.

The nonprofit recently
conducted and released an Environmental Impact Assessment,
which concluded that the system mostly posed low risks for
environmental harms (with a potential medium risk for sea turtles
feeding on collected plastic).

But all the researchers Shiffman spoke with said the system would
either probably or definitely kill marine life.

Whether the system will even be able to effectively trap plastic
at the ocean’s surface is still an open question, oceanographer
Kim Martini
recently told the CBC. It’s likely that once things start to
grow on the structures, they could be weighed down enough that
plastic just flows over them, she said.

It’s possible that storms or waves could eventually turn the
arrays into debris, though The Ocean Cleanup says it has designed
the systems to withstand large weather systems.

Even if The Ocean Cleanup can capture some amount of plastic,
recycling it will still be a problem. Unlike with glass and
aluminum,
plastic recycling doesn’t work well in the first place.
Plastics break down into more degraded, lower quality materials
over time, if they can be recycled at all. Materials that have
been degraded by ocean water and sunlight are even less likely to
be turned into anything useful.

The group says that the samples collected on past expeditions
were still recyclable and of “surprisingly good quality.” They
are still investigating recycling methods to figure out the best
way to make use of the plastic.

The Ocean Cleanup

Solving the plastic problem

By questioning whether The Ocean Cleanup’s system can effectively
remove any significant plastic from the ocean, critics aren’t
saying that dealing with plastic pollution is hopeless. They’re
arguing for more effective solutions.

Most of these solutions involve stopping plastic before it makes
its way out to sea.

Martini has
argued that the group’s arrays should be placed off the
shores where most plastic enters the ocean.

The Ocean Cleanup says its goal is to focus the gyres for now
since there’s already plastic there that “must be removed to
prevent it from photodegrading and breaking down into
microplastics, making it harder to remove and making it easier to
mistake for food by sealife.”

But the group does acknowledge that without stopping the
flow of plastics from shore, there’s no way to keep the gyres
plastic-free. “[I]t would be nothing short of disheartening
if we had to go back out to clean up again after a few years,”
said the spokesperson. The Ocean Cleanup is considering other
cleaning systems closer to shore in the future.

There are also other groups attempting to collect plastic before
it goes out to sea. The
Ocean Conservancy has collected more than 200 million pounds
of trash from beaches, and Baltimore has a trash-collecting
water wheel that has trapped more than 1.8 million pounds of
trash in the Inner Harbor since May 2014.

As Rick Stafford, a professor of marine biology and conservation,
wrote
for The Conversation, local governments could incentivize
proper disposal of plastic and eventually phase out disposable
single-use plastics overall.

Eliminating single-use plastic waste would be a massive
transformation for society — think of how many wrappers you tear
off food products every day. But creating products that are meant
to be used only once means that much of that waste is getting
piled up somewhere. Since it’s hard to effectively recycle
plastic in the first place, much of that waste eventually makes
it out to sea.

If we really want to stop that, the best way to do so is probably
to stop it at the source and reduce our use of plastic overall.