According to this website (https://www.condorferries.co.uk/plastic-in-the-ocean-statistics) 33 billion pounds of plastic enter the ocean each year.
So in the same timeframe that ocean cleanup extracted 25,000 pounds, 2.5 billion pounds were dumped.
I’m not saying its not a worthwhile exercise, but that’s depressing.
Your article is a bit misleading with the mixing of denominations.
This article says they got about 50 tons in a month, so ~600 tons a year.
There’s ~100-200 million tons of plastic in the ocean now, with a further 14 million tons being added every year (33 billion pounds in metric tons).
14 million tons at 600 removed a year for 1 boat is 23k years. But at 23k boats that’s 1 year. There are about 6k shipping monstrosities out on the oceans at any given time, 50k ships navigate the oceans every year.
If we increase the yield of these boats by just 2 fold, these numbers start making sense to fix within a lifetime, which is amazing. Without counting the reduction in waste added we can easily fix.
Humanity should have expected the cleanup to take as many generations if not more than it took to put plastic in, we’re lucky we can get this close.
This is not greenwashing.
of note, the more they clean up, the less efficient their clean process will be since the concentration/abundance of trash will reduce.
On the other hand, as more time passes the technology involved in ocean cleanup may improve.
Future kids will figure it out.
…if we don’t go extinct.
Ocean cleanup is also working on systems to prevent plastic from leaving rivers and flowing into the oceans.
It’s just meaningless greenwashing.
A feel-good gesture that ultimately does squat in helping anyone or anything but it sure makes entitled people feel superior about themselves… I cleaned up the oceans, praise me!
Let’s praise them some more so we can raise awareness and potential donations. 1000x the operation and we’ll get somewhere.
I’m also fine with threatening countries with sanctions if they don’t reduce their plastic pollution.
Even at 100,000x all you would be doing is treading water. This is how big the problem is and how utterly pointless this particular clean up effort was.
Virtually all the plastic in the oceans comes from two sources: River waste from seven different rivers in Asia, and fishing nets that are discarded by fishing trawlers.
Stop those at their source and you will eliminate something like 90% of the plastic waste in the ocean.
You should consider the possibility that not everyone is exactly like you, and maybe some people do good things for motives you don’t understand.
A meaningless gesture that accomplishes nothing.
no, you’re wrong. This organization is basically still experimenting, and they have come a long way over the years. There are also efforts to trap plastics at mouths of rivers to try and slow down polluting the ocean. There is hope yet.
Posted above, but that 33 billion is there to scare ppl, which also has the effect of giving people like you excuses to be synical.
The difference is it’s 33 billion pounds, which is ~14 million metric TONS.
If you do the math it start looking achievable, and this is just some startup that gets its funding through charity. Imagine what the worlds governments could do taking this seriously. We could clean the ocean within a generation, which is amazing considering.
There’s a lot of greenwashing out there, this isn’t it. You might want to look up the definition of greenwashing.
Did you just convert the units and magically now think that makes this any more achievable?! LOL
You’d need 100,000x the effort to simply tread water. Not to eliminate waste, mind you, but to simply keep up with what is dumped in each year.
Yes, it’s called perspective. 33 BilLiOn pounds sound like an insurmountable amount but it’s not. It’s 14 million TONS, the unit of measure the boat is using to assess how much it’s picking up. As I said, in the end thats a few thousand boats out there for less than a couple decades, assuming we don’t reduce our waste or make these machines more efficient, which isn’t likely. 2 decades isn’t a big cleanup time compared to how long we’ve been dumping shit in.
I think the math confused you because you don’t need 100,000 times the effort.
Did you miss the part where there are 33 BILLION pounds of plastic added to the oceans EACH YEAR?! This isn’t a one-and-done problem. That is 2 decades of clean-up for EACH YEAR of waste dumped into the oceans. You are completely missing the scope of the problem. By orders of magnitude.
Yes, the 14 million TONS is the 33 billion pounds added each year. We can get to 0 with the above math in no time, and get the total (the other 200 million) down in a couple decades. It’s you that’s not following the post. This is without us reducing the total total output of plastic in oceans, which we are and will continue to do.
25000pounds = 11339.8 kg
And they took it to a local garbage dump, which then got shipped off to China, and then thrown right back into the ocean.
