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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 tr

by gizmo 7y ago

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.

mikkelam 7y ago
...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. https://theoceancleanup.com/rivers/ https://theoceancleanup.com/rivers/
- bagacrap 7y ago
  It would surprise me if nets at the mouths of rivers didn't royally screw up the wildlife and/or boat traffic. And what do they do with that plastic they trap? The root problem is those societies have no better way to dispose of plastic than letting it drift to sea. Proper waste collection and disposal services are far preferable to installing a net and telling everyone, "Yo it's ok to throw all your trash in the river now." This startup is long on hype and has zero results. Ok they spent tons of money to collect a few lbs of trash. The CEO was on Joe Rogan last month telling everyone he was going to clean up half the patch in 5 years (not even sure what that means since it's constantly growing). How much did those ships cost to run per day though? $50k. So he doesn't even have a working POC if you factor in costs. He's just out there on a premature victory tour, doing more harm than good by convincing people that someone else has solved the plastic problem for them. What a hero.
  - pssdbt 7y ago
    This is an impressive level of negativity.
    - ivanhoe 7y ago
      Is it? What cleaned up my country's rivers of plastic after many failed projects was a government program of paying for returned plastic bottles. In poor countries (and that's where the most of plastic comes from) you don't really need complex or super-smart automatic systems to do this job as manual work is cheap. Just pay enough for recycled plastic so that it makes a viable source of profit for those in need, and you'll have a massive army of people collecting waste much more diligent than any net or automated system.
  - manigandham 7y ago
    What to do with the plastic is a separate problem that needs proper logistics, but step 1 is removing it from the oceans and rivers. That's where this program is helping. Also the river cleanup systems are completely automated and solar powered. Where did you get the $50k number from?
  - hanniabu 7y ago
    It's not a zero sum game. There are other projects tackling garbage collection and processing on land as well. > So he doesn't even have a working POC if you factor in costs. Saying we shouldn't do something because it isn't profitable is what got us into this mess in the first place. Since we've been shitting where we eat, it's about time where we need to start eating our own shit metaphorically. It's better to do this than do nothing. If something more cost efficient comes out in a few years, sure that's great, but we don't quite have the luxury of sitting on the sidelines and waiting/hoping for that to happen.
    - mcv 7y ago
      > "Since we've been shitting where we eat, it's about time where we need to start eating our own shit metaphorically." Not just metaphorically. Well, the shit is, but not the eating. Apparently there's plastic in our salt and drinking water now, so we are officially eating our own pollution.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
ehnto 7y ago
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.
- gizmo 7y ago
  It's much cheaper to prevent plastic reaching the ocean than cleaning it up after, so that's where the focus should be. It's not a matter of the damage "already been done". All additional plastic that ends up in the ocean is still bad. Estimates are that 10% of all plastics produced annually ends up in the ocean, about 10 million tonnes annually. That's a staggering amount. The great pacific garbage patch -- as mentioned in the article -- is twice the size of Texas, but the garbage density is low: only 4 parts per m3. And only 5% of the garbage is at the surface (10 meters deep or so). That's what makes the cleanup fiendishly difficult. So let's focus on the low hanging fruit first.
  - titzer 7y ago
    > so that's where the focus should be. See this a lot. You are using your own limited attention span to argue that others shouldn't be doing the work they are doing because you can only think about one problem at a time. There are 7.7 billion people on this Earth damn it, we can and should work on multiple different parts of a problem at once. The garbage which is in the oceans needs to extracted (and extracted now, before it gets ground into microplastics), and as others have mentioned, other people are working on catching runoff waste at river sources. I never really understood people who shout from the sidelines that people who are actually working their asses off on the problem are doing it wrong. Have a little more respect.
    - hanniabu 7y ago
      Not to mention that there are other projects focus on stopping garbage creation at the source of consumers with creating garbage collection and processing programs in these 3rd world areas.
    - 7y ago
keanzu 7y ago
> collect a few thousand pounds 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-retrieved-pacific-ocean-cleanup https://www.voanews.com/science-health/40-tons-fishing-nets-... 40 tons in a month by an NGO funded by donations and sponsors.
- andreasley 7y ago
  For comparison: About 60 tons (53 metric tons) of fishing nets are lost each month, reportedly. [1] [1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/nov/06/dumped-fishing-gear-is-biggest-plastic-polluter-in-ocean-finds-report https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/nov/06/dumped-f...
  - hanniabu 7y ago
    It would be nice if fishermen could only use certified nets that costed an hefty fee to encourage strategies to prevent loss of nets and also to provide extra funding to ocean cleanup efforts from the proceeds of these certified nets.
    - belorn 7y ago
      From my experience, small scale local fishermen are very invested in not losing nets. They are a big investments. Most would actually be very happy if nets had some form of fingerprint identification in order to combat theft and illegal fishing, especially if the police could look it up in a central register. Regulation in this area would be a win-win for almost everyone involved.
- Retric 7y ago
  Yet, their was more plastic in the Pacific when they left than when they started. Filtering river discharge could make a meaningful difference, what their doing is at best a publicity stunt. Another 9 million tons (8 million metric tons) of plastic waste, including plastic bottles, bags, toys and other items, flow annually into the ocean from beaches, rivers and creeks, according to experts. So 8,000,000/year vs ~36 per month. In other words they spent 300,000$ and reduced the oceans added plastic load that month by 0.0054%.

by gizmo 7y ago

mikkelam 7y ago

...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. https://theoceancleanup.com/rivers/ https://theoceancleanup.com/rivers/

bagacrap 7y ago
It would surprise me if nets at the mouths of rivers didn't royally screw up the wildlife and/or boat traffic. And what do they do with that plastic they trap? The root problem is those societies have no better way to dispose of plastic than letting it drift to sea. Proper waste collection and disposal services are far preferable to installing a net and telling everyone, "Yo it's ok to throw all your trash in the river now." This startup is long on hype and has zero results. Ok they spent tons of money to collect a few lbs of trash. The CEO was on Joe Rogan last month telling everyone he was going to clean up half the patch in 5 years (not even sure what that means since it's constantly growing). How much did those ships cost to run per day though? $50k. So he doesn't even have a working POC if you factor in costs. He's just out there on a premature victory tour, doing more harm than good by convincing people that someone else has solved the plastic problem for them. What a hero.
- pssdbt 7y ago
  This is an impressive level of negativity.
  - ivanhoe 7y ago
    Is it? What cleaned up my country's rivers of plastic after many failed projects was a government program of paying for returned plastic bottles. In poor countries (and that's where the most of plastic comes from) you don't really need complex or super-smart automatic systems to do this job as manual work is cheap. Just pay enough for recycled plastic so that it makes a viable source of profit for those in need, and you'll have a massive army of people collecting waste much more diligent than any net or automated system.
- manigandham 7y ago
  What to do with the plastic is a separate problem that needs proper logistics, but step 1 is removing it from the oceans and rivers. That's where this program is helping. Also the river cleanup systems are completely automated and solar powered. Where did you get the $50k number from?
- hanniabu 7y ago
  It's not a zero sum game. There are other projects tackling garbage collection and processing on land as well. > So he doesn't even have a working POC if you factor in costs. Saying we shouldn't do something because it isn't profitable is what got us into this mess in the first place. Since we've been shitting where we eat, it's about time where we need to start eating our own shit metaphorically. It's better to do this than do nothing. If something more cost efficient comes out in a few years, sure that's great, but we don't quite have the luxury of sitting on the sidelines and waiting/hoping for that to happen.
  - mcv 7y ago
    > "Since we've been shitting where we eat, it's about time where we need to start eating our own shit metaphorically." Not just metaphorically. Well, the shit is, but not the eating. Apparently there's plastic in our salt and drinking water now, so we are officially eating our own pollution.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

ehnto 7y ago

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.

gizmo 7y ago
It's much cheaper to prevent plastic reaching the ocean than cleaning it up after, so that's where the focus should be. It's not a matter of the damage "already been done". All additional plastic that ends up in the ocean is still bad. Estimates are that 10% of all plastics produced annually ends up in the ocean, about 10 million tonnes annually. That's a staggering amount. The great pacific garbage patch -- as mentioned in the article -- is twice the size of Texas, but the garbage density is low: only 4 parts per m3. And only 5% of the garbage is at the surface (10 meters deep or so). That's what makes the cleanup fiendishly difficult. So let's focus on the low hanging fruit first.
- titzer 7y ago
  > so that's where the focus should be. See this a lot. You are using your own limited attention span to argue that others shouldn't be doing the work they are doing because you can only think about one problem at a time. There are 7.7 billion people on this Earth damn it, we can and should work on multiple different parts of a problem at once. The garbage which is in the oceans needs to extracted (and extracted now, before it gets ground into microplastics), and as others have mentioned, other people are working on catching runoff waste at river sources. I never really understood people who shout from the sidelines that people who are actually working their asses off on the problem are doing it wrong. Have a little more respect.
  - hanniabu 7y ago
    Not to mention that there are other projects focus on stopping garbage creation at the source of consumers with creating garbage collection and processing programs in these 3rd world areas.
  - 7y ago

keanzu 7y ago

> collect a few thousand pounds 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-retrieved-pacific-ocean-cleanup https://www.voanews.com/science-health/40-tons-fishing-nets-... 40 tons in a month by an NGO funded by donations and sponsors.

andreasley 7y ago
For comparison: About 60 tons (53 metric tons) of fishing nets are lost each month, reportedly. [1] [1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/nov/06/dumped-fishing-gear-is-biggest-plastic-polluter-in-ocean-finds-report https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/nov/06/dumped-f...
- hanniabu 7y ago
  It would be nice if fishermen could only use certified nets that costed an hefty fee to encourage strategies to prevent loss of nets and also to provide extra funding to ocean cleanup efforts from the proceeds of these certified nets.
  - belorn 7y ago
    From my experience, small scale local fishermen are very invested in not losing nets. They are a big investments. Most would actually be very happy if nets had some form of fingerprint identification in order to combat theft and illegal fishing, especially if the police could look it up in a central register. Regulation in this area would be a win-win for almost everyone involved.
Retric 7y ago
Yet, their was more plastic in the Pacific when they left than when they started. Filtering river discharge could make a meaningful difference, what their doing is at best a publicity stunt. Another 9 million tons (8 million metric tons) of plastic waste, including plastic bottles, bags, toys and other items, flow annually into the ocean from beaches, rivers and creeks, according to experts. So 8,000,000/year vs ~36 per month. In other words they spent 300,000$ and reduced the oceans added plastic load that month by 0.0054%.