Being able to clean up environmental messes is more important than preventing them in the future This is the most short sited perspective imaginable, yes clean

Being able to clean up environmental messes is more important than preventing them in the future This is the most short sited perspective imaginable, yes cleanup is important, but we're adding to this disaster at an increasing rate. Additionally, new materials are more dangerous to the ecosystem then those already there, the existing materials have already leached their coatings and additives into the water and started to decompose, adding new plastics adds more chemicals and restarts the clock on the process of decomposition. Reducing the incoming plastics by some amount is more important then removing that same amount, and doesn't have the same risk of adding to the waste, which this project seriously does. The quality of the recovered plastic is zero. It will be an unsortable mix of unusably degraded and potentially contaminated plastics, other buoyant waste matter and various organic material. This will not be something that anyone can use, it will need to be disposed of, which is a huge cost this project is ignoring. Environmentalists and experts on the marine ecosystem have been trumpeting this problem for longer than Slat has been alive. The "research published by this same group" ignores the huge amount of previous research that has been conducted, and ignored the existing studies that showed the depth of the plastics reaches as far as 100m, putting any numbers they suggest into question.