Our globe’s ocean-plastic dilemma is increasingly spotlighted in the media, and understandably. With billions of individual pieces of plastic in the ocean and other bodies of water, our nonbiodegradable trash presents detrimental effects to marine life, from directly starving and killing turtles to increasing the risk of disease on coral reefs.
So, what do we do? Sit and read articles about plastic pollution and maybe inconvenience ourselves by foregoing that plastic straw and wonder what can be done. Things are being done.
The Ocean Cleanup, a Netherlands-based nonprofit announced within this month that their creation has started doing its job—picking up ocean plastic. It is a huge U-shaped floating device that sweeps the ocean with a net, able to catch trash on and slightly below the surface of the ocean. Deployed in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an area roughly twice the size of Texas between Hawaii and California, after a few imperfect attempts, their latest prototype is now “successfully capturing and collecting plastic debris,” according to the Ocean Cleanup website. The debris ranges from large-scale trash to microplastics as small as one millimeter. The Ocean Cleanup plans to release several more of these plastic picker-uppers, with the intention of decreasing the size of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch by one half every five years. Practically, however, Ocean Cleanup is still working on being financially viable, which requires creating a prototype that can hold plastic on the ocean for up to several months before being collected by a ship.
Again, technology seems to have been the answer, or at least in part. Though hopeful, the Ocean Cleanup’s project only affects a percentage of the issue. A majority of plastic rests beneath touch of the device’s skirt-like nets. Also unaffected are the microplastics smaller than one millimeter, such as microbeads and microfibers from our shampoos and laundry. And once picked up by a ship, is it only taken to be dumped in our every-growing landfills?
But for now, let’s enjoy the step forward.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/02/tech/ocean-cleanup-catching-plastic-scn-trnd/index.html