The Great Pacific Garbage Patch could be gone in ten years – for chump change
$7.5 billion needed, the kind of cash Apple makes without trying
Video After six years of sea trials, environmental group The Ocean Cleanup claims it has proved that the Great Pacific Garbage Patch – a floating mass of plastic waste twice the size of Texas – could be cleaned up in ten years using current technology, at a cost of a mere $7.5 billion.
Speaking in San Francisco last Friday, Ocean Cleanup founder and CEO Boyan Slat said that since last May the System 3 collection machine – which uses a 1.4 mile (2.25km)-long boom to scoop plastic into a collecting net – had collected a million pounds (over 450,000kg) of plastic trash, cleaning up an area about the size of New Jersey over 22 trips. That's still only half a percent of the total, but Slat argued that it proved the point that existing tech will do the job.
"The results of the last 12 months of operations have proven that we can clean up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in a responsible way in ten years time at a cost of $7.5 billion," he explained, in the video below.
$7.5 billion is a colossal sum – but also just 16 percent of the bonus Tesla shareholders agreed to hand over to Elon Musk, around half of the money Google has spent purchasing its own stock every quarter for the last few years, or less than a month's worth of Apple's profits for 2023.
Slat was too polite to suggest such examples – presumably because he's looking for funding – but he did point out $7.5 billion is also about one percent of the annual net profits of the world's plastic producers.
The Ocean Cleanup team has been trying out new techniques to make the operation more effective – including using airborne drones to spot the biggest trash zones and GPS buoys to chart their movement. If those ideas work, Slat suggested it could be possible to clear the whole patch in just five years, at the bargain price of just $4 billion.
Last year's trash collection effort revealed some surprising and heartening results. On the one hand, some of the plastics found dated back to the 1960s – illustrating just how much there is to clear and how long it's been neglected. On the other hand 92 per cent of the trash is still in reasonably large chunks, rather than breaking down into microplastics and entering the aquatic food chain.
Three billion people depend on the seas for their main source of protein, Slat added. But this isn't just a coastal problem – microplastics have been found near the peak of Mount Everest. They've also been detected in 75 percent of Italian mothers' breast milk and are suspected to be present in most human lungs. Curbing their spread feels like a good idea as the effect of plastics in our bodies is not well understood.
But it's not enough just to sweep the oceans clear again, he opined, since that's only half the problem. The non-profit is also building solar-powered plastic collection barges over 19 of the world's most polluted rivers – to stop plastics floating out into the oceans.
"This is what we can do with technology that we have now," he urged. "The only thing standing between us and clean oceans is money." ®