After three years extracting plastic waste from the notorious Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an environmental nonprofit says it can finish the job within a decade, with a price tag of several billion dollars.
Twice the size of Texas, the mass of about 79,000 metric tons of plastic floating in the Pacific Ocean between California and Hawaii is growing at an exponential pace, according to researchers.
That’s great news. It doesn’t say in the article but are they going to start on the Great Atlantic Garbage Patch after they are done?
This is a white-paper proposal for a clean-up effort that nobody wants to fund. The CEO of Ocean Cleanup has been pitching this fix since 2012. This isn’t even a new idea, its just been going through permutations of refinement since the initial proposal, with funding coming primarily from private independent donations. But we’re talking tens-of-millions raised on a project that needs 100x that amount.
And it does not appear to include the cost of physically processing the removed waste, just collecting and moving it to another location.
Given the stinginess of state governments when it comes to waste cleanup, I’m not holding my breath.
There seems to be a basic math problem here - if it’s still growing at an exponential pace, any effort to clean it up will fail
Why don’t we focus on scaling those trash interceptors to every major river and harbor, to see if we can fix that math?
Most of the garbage comes from commercial fishing. So that won’t help.
At least that’ll correct itself when all the fish are dead, right?
…right?
I think this company has few different teams that work on the problem from different angles
Some are on the boats in the Pacific some are building interceptors in rivers in countries that are the largest producers of waste that makes it to the ocean. Of course they can’t fix the problem just slow it down. The fix comes from these countries changing how they allow garbage to be collected and stored.
I will be a billionaire in ten years by solving climate change and rolling back the clock on all human damage to the earth!
Money pweeeeese
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