First 100k KG Removed from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch

https://theoceancleanup.com/updates/first-100000-kg-removed-from-the-great-pacific-garbage-patch/

by crecker • 4 years ago

64 29 4 years ago

theoceancleanup.com

cercatrova• 4 years ago

And put where? Are they recycling it for new products?

jjeaff• 4 years ago

Even a landfill would be preferable to floating loose in the ocean.

rolivercoffee• 4 years ago

That’s their plan.

https://theoceancleanup.com/waste-management-and-recycling/

throwaway815232• 4 years ago

They estimate that there is around 80,000 tons (8e7 kg) of plastic in the patch, so they will have to scale up quite a lot to make any dent in it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_garbage_patch#Si...

aksss• 4 years ago

Per article: "100,000,000 kg if we include the Outer GPGP. Thus, if we repeat this 100,000 kg haul 1,000 times – the Great Pacific Garbage Patch will be gone...we are ready to move on to our new and expanded System 03, which is expected to capture plastic at a rate potentially 10 times higher than System 002 through a combination of increased size, improved efficiency, and increased uptime."

dane-pgp• 4 years ago

1,000 times ... a rate potentially 10 times higher

So with System 03 they would need to do 100 missions (and the missions take maybe a year?) but if they had funding for ten of these deployments and ran them simultaneously then the problem would be gone in 10 years (after complementary measures are taken to prevent the patch from growing).

I wonder if the International Maritime Organization could mandate that all fishing gear be marked with unique barcodes, and require countries to check that all boats heading out into international waters have recorded those barcodes against their ship registrations in a global public log. The biggest political problem with that would be allowing other countries to do inspections to ensure compliance.

rowanG077• 4 years ago

That's actually a lot less then I thought. For some reason I thought Ocean: very vast, and a great patch within that? Must be millions of tons at least. But 80000 tons sounds like a fixable amount if we truly invested.

netsharc• 4 years ago

100k KG.. I guess no one uses Megagrams? Or that's also 100 metric tonnes...

GekkePrutser• 4 years ago

Putting it at 100 tonnes makes it sound a lot less. That's the max weight of 4 shipping containers. Or the fuel capacity of one Boeing 787.

Still I'm glad someone is doing something, perhaps this will spur more parties to help.

londons_explore3• 4 years ago

Mega grams...

Mega seconds ....

Kilowatt-hours... (When the closest SI unit of energy is the megajoule)

Km/hour... (When the closest SI unit of velocity is m/s)

All failures of the SI system.

londons_explore3• 4 years ago

I'd like to see a sample of this garbage.

How much (by weight) is plastic? How much is seaweed? How much is ocean water which is stuck in the plastic now?

Things like a 1 gram bag could easily get 100 grams of weed growing on it, which absorbs 1kg of water. It's now very difficult to weigh that 1 gram which is now only 0.1% of the total mass.

It's also not obviously clear that removing the weed-covered bag from the environment is a good plan, if you're removing 100 grams of biomass for each gram of plastic removed.

SantalBlush• 4 years ago

It's not clear what you're suggesting. Do you think it would be better to leave the plastic in the ocean, or remove all of the seaweed from each piece of plastic before removing the plastic?

Second question: do you have some prior knowledge in this area that informs your opinion?

londons_explore3• 4 years ago

I've just spent a bit of time in boats, and sometimes have hauled big patches of weedy garbage aboard just for fun.

Some types of weed entangle like spaghetti with one-another so just grabbing one corner and pulling means you can haul a few hundred kilos of weed into a boat by hand.

Most floating garbage gets covered in weed, shells, and even a few small fish or corals pretty quick. I really don't see how the garbage could be separated without destroying the weed and ecosystems attached.

Doing it at scale without some research to be sure it's the best plan seems like a really bad idea.

0x_rs• 4 years ago

About 40% of the GPGP is made of fishing nets.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-22939-w

jakecopp• 4 years ago

Think of how much cheaper per kg it is to _prevent_ new plastic entering the ocean rather than pulling plastic from the middle of the ocean!

Why on earth are we pulling ~100s of kg while there is still 8.8 million tonnes entering the ocean each year?! [1]

aka Ocean Bound Plastic, I've seen a few products use it (but I don't know how to go about certification): https://www.hermanmiller.com/en_apc/better-world/sustainabil...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastic_pollution

ncmncm4• 4 years ago

100k kg is just 100t. Why not just say 100t? Maybe because 100t out of 80,000t would not seem like much.

And, it wouldn't be. But if they can work out how to make the things reliable and affordable, deploying 10 of them that are each 10x bigger gets the patch cleaned up in 8 years. Provided we are not dumping that much in at the same rate.

I used to think that recycling plastic was dumb, because plastic in a landfill is carbon nicely sequestered. But apparently making new plastic burns several times that amount of carbon. So, even if the petroleum that would have been made into new plastic is instead cracked and burned for fuel, you still come out ahead by reusing it.

lloydatkinson3• 4 years ago

Why would they go with a measurement that has two well known definitions? There is ton and tonne. Most people don't know the difference.

KG is metric and universal in most countries.

ncmncm4• 4 years ago

The difference is negligible, in this use.

ksec• 4 years ago

I thought most of the world have settled on Metric Ton / tonne already.

Are there any places where Imperial Ton is still being used?

i386• 4 years ago

Highly arrogant American pov. The rest of us deal with kilograms. Cope with it.

Ekaros• 4 years ago

As european I agree, kilo-kilograms are redundant. Either 100 000kg or 100t.

garaetjjte• 4 years ago

Why not 100 Mg?

ncmncm4• 4 years ago

Most people are not used to Mg quantities. Also it is the symbol for magnesium.

When you are talking about garbage, tons is the familiar unit. Metric or Imperial, it doesn't matter.

First 100k KG Removed from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch

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