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In other news: After a 3 week charter to collect plastics from the nort-pacific gyre the Ocean Voyages Institute has arrived in Honolulu on board Sailing Vessel
by jacobwilliamroy 7y ago
In other news: After a 3 week charter to collect plastics from the nort-pacific gyre the Ocean Voyages Institute has arrived in Honolulu on board Sailing Vessel Kwai, with 40 tons of derelict fishing gear and consumer plastics. The vessel came home with room to spare and after more funds are raised, The Ocean Voyages Institute may charter Kwai or another ship for a longer expedition to collect a larger mass of plastic. It will probably be Kwai again, as she and her crew are specially suited to this kind of work; they often load and unload cargo in places with no-where to anchor.
The OVI has been able to collect large quantities of plastic, very quickly, because they distributed GPS trackers to various vessels of opportunity. Such vessels volunteered to attach trackers to any debris they encounter while traversing the pacific, allowing the Kwai to sail straight for large clumps of plastic debris.
The ocean plastics issue is a lot more complicated than these cleanup efforts make it seem. Large debris are just the tip of the iceberg. Microplastics, consumption of single-use plastics, the U.N.'s estimate that 600 tons of netting enter the ocean each year, etc. etc. (I want to emphasize those etc's because this list is quite long)
Restoring and protecting the world's oceans requires more resources and I am honestly surprised how difficult it is to raise money to do the things which are required to sustain human life on earth. Utterly baffled. We launch satellites into space to broadcast 4K boxing to the last mile, but engineering new packaging materials, and zero-waste systems for distributing those packages is just beyond the pale.
- ar-jan 7y ago> Large debris are just the tip of the iceberg. One reason for The Ocean Cleanup's current work is to get the larger parts now, before they degrade to microplastics.
- hanniabu 7y ago600 tons of netting a year is just mind boggling, I can't imagine how many animals are getting tangled in that
- jacobwilliamroy 7y agoIt is hard to estimate. When they remove the ghost net, any non-entangled animals will scatter. The OVI only found one dead, entangled swordfish during their operation. Mary Crowley thinks that entangled animals get eaten fairly quickly so it's hard to know how many have died in the nets. It still is not known why there were so few entangled animals found on this voyage. I have a suspicion that when The Ocean Cleanup says "the device had no environmental impact" they really are saying they did not find any entangled animals in the ghost nets they concentrated.
- Joakal 7y agoDoes marine animal bones sink with no flesh? Is it heavy enough to sink nets? It could be a matter of a dumping ground for nets in one place and it floats around oceans while the unlucky animals getting caught in net bring net to sea floor.
- pvaldes 7y ago> Is it heavy enough to sink nets? It depends on the type and size of the net. Dermochelys coriacea can weight 500Kg easily a) An obvious solution that would protect fisheries, and save the lives of thousands of marine birds, turtles, seals and whales, would be to change by international laws the matherial used in nets to made it more degradable in some points b) Another partial solution could be to build shredder ships c) And I suppose that anything that would replace part of the expensive fuel spent by very big war ships (aircraft carriers, etc) would save millions of dollars. Equipate this floating cities with secondary motors able to burn plastic instead gas would increase dramatically the autonomy of those ships, reduce the temptation to get ride of the garbage dumping it in the open sea, and would benefit also the environment, something that can be used to improve PR also. b) and c) could be combined in one solution allowing the shredder ships reducing their cost per hour at sea All they would need is to equipate ships with big particle filters like black boxes to store ALL the dioxins and noxious substances until real decontamination in appropiate ports. Modern cars have yet this technology. Some plastics are reciclable and could be sold and used as an economic resource instead as garbage. Just my 2 Cents
- nitrogen 7y agoTo set a reference scale, how many tons of fish are in the ocean?
- toomanybeersies 7y agoBetween 0.8 and 2 billion tonnes: https://phys.org/news/2009-01-first-ever-worldwide-fish-biomass-impact.html https://phys.org/news/2009-01-first-ever-worldwide-fish-biom...
- pvaldes 7y agoNope. This work only counts species catched, involved in fisheries. The real value would be much higher when we include unedible, mesopelagic and abyssal fishes.
- toomanybeersies 7y agoI know absolutely nothing about commercial fishing, but that number sounds surprisingly low to me.
- beamatronic 7y agoI hope they didn’t unload the collected garbage on O’ahu or anywhere else in the islands for that matter! Bring it back to the mainland...
- jacobwilliamroy 7y agoTheir haul was mostly ghost nets and its hard to trace the origin of those. There are people on Oahu who have voluntarily taken custody of the nets to try and figure out what to do with them. H-power wants to use them as fuel. A very small amount are being turned into sculptures. The rest are going off to other parts of the world. The reuse problem is still unsolved.
- Cthulhu_ 7y agoSingle-use plastics and the like are not the problem, and the West does not have to feel guilty about the plastic in the ocean; the vast majority comes from Asian rivers. The only reason why any plastic enters the ocean from the US can be attributed to littering and a lack of people cleaning up litter. That said, a large chunk of waste is also exported abroad, and nobody knows (or, wants to know) what happens then - no longer our problem.