"of the 79,000 metric tons of plastic in the patch, most of it is abandoned fishing gear—not plastic bottles or packaging drawing headlines today ... fishing nets account for 46 percent of the trash, with the majority of the rest composed of other fishing industry gear, including ropes, oyster spacers, eel traps, crates, and baskets."[1]
But we also need to stop it happening again. Which means stopping fishing nets and plastic trash from being dumped in the sea by ships. And preventing plastic that is dumped into rivers in developing countries [1] from reaching the sea. These are hard problems.
Given that ~80% of the GPGP is from commercial fishing, I don't know how we ever stop them or catch them. A factory can be checked at its outflows. We'd have to monitor and catalog everything on every fishing ship and that just doesn't scale. At best we could add a fee to global commercial fishing fee to all boats based on the wholesale of their catch and spend that on clean up and other sustainability efforts.
In this particular case I think it’s worth specifically calling out The Philippines, who are responsible for a third of all ocean waste. India are second at ~12%, but also with a billion and a half people that’s a little more understandable
The fishing market is 600B $... So if they invest 1% of that market size into the cleaning, they can go on with current practices... They can even improve the process and make it cheaper.
1% is a lot.. gross margin for the big bulk fishing operations is around 10% so you are asking them to give up 10% of their profits
To put 1% in more context, the biggest companies like P&G, Verizon, Progressive Insurance etc will never spend more that 3% of revenue MAXIMUM on their total marketing budget..and that is money that they directly measure ROI from.
This is the same line of thinking as "we just need $X to wipe out all college debt/medical debt". Sure, you can do it, but what happens when the same amount of debt is racked up again in a couple years? Do you keep using taxpayer money/crowdfunding/whatever else to pay it off every time? Or should you stop and address the core problem first, then fix the symptoms?
This is the same line of thinking as "we just need $X to wipe out all college debt/medical debt". Sure, you can do it, but what happens when the same amount of debt is racked up again in a couple years?
So you never clean your toilet because it's just going to get dirty again?
> The Ocean Cleanup’s operations demonstrate that the elimination of the GPGP can be done at today’s level of performance in 10 years at a cost of $7.5bn
> Data and modelling indicate that the removal of the GPGP could be achieved in 5 years at a cost of $4bn
We should do this at either price point, but ... what's the difference here? If we can do it faster and cheaper, why put the higher price quote in the headline? Is the 'data and modeling' including some extrapolation that assumes performance will increase meaningfully once they're started at scale?
1) We have been doing some cleaning and, based on our real results that we have recorded, we are saying it can be cleaned up for $7.5bn over 10 years.
2) Separately, we have also done some thinking and modeling about other approaches and we project that we could probably clean up the same area in less time for less money.
True, but "filled with lots" and "slurry" might also be misleading. It's many tiny particles of plastic across a really big area, with the pieces so small and far between that it's generally not visible from the surface.
Here's John Cook's description:
So how dense is it? Let’s assume 80,000 metric tons over an area twice the size of Texas. The area of Texas is 700,000 km² , so that’s 8 × 10^10 grams of trash over 1.4 × 10^12 square meters, or 57 milligrams per square meter.
An empty water bottle weighs about 20 grams, and an American football field covers 5300 square meters, so this would be the same density of plastic as 15 empty water bottles scattered over a football field.
This is the cost of cleaning the Pacific Ocean's great garbage patch[a] with System 03[b], a cleaning process designed, deployed and operated by the OP's organization for removing garbage from the ocean and recycling much of it (e.g., non-biodegradable plastics) into new products.
Even if the cost estimate of $7.5B is off by a factor of 2x or 3x, deploying this technology to clean up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch looks like a no-brainer to me. The long-term financial benefits for the world could be multiple orders of magnitude larger.
> Why is System 03 so much bigger than System 002?
> Size matters because cleaning the ocean becomes cheaper and more efficient with bigger systems. By making System 03 so much bigger than our previous efforts (alongside the multiple upgrades we’ve implemented) we can cover a much larger area of ocean in less time and using fewer resources – driving down our cost per kilogram of plastic removed and maximizing our benefit on the marine environment. System 002 proved our technology and demonstrated that cleaning the GPGP is feasible; System 03 aims to prove that it is also economically viable. Scaling up to this size is an essential step towards meeting that objective.
It's refreshing to see this vocabulary/way of talking used on an environmentalist website.
These are unknowable at these scales and levels of complexity. Such
lack of imagination shouldn't be an obstacle to starting anyway. Some
things are self-evidently "gonna be great".
I am fascinated by the era of National Projects, like Apollo and the
Hoover (Boulder) dam. What we need in this world right now (other than
love sweet love) is a massive feel-good project. 7bn is piffling small
change in the context of projects like Apollo (the US Moon landings).
What we now understand about the "space race" in its cold-war context
is that it was more about pride, signalling achievement and willpower
than any actual strategic significance. Stuff you do "because you can".
William James penned "The Moral Equivalent of War" (which president
Carter riffed on) in an era when there was so much less cynicism,
disaffection, resignation and apathy, and when grand projects were
something people got excited about, and got behind instead of
shrugging "who will pay for it?"
Instead of seeing this as a chore, and arguing about whose garbage it
is, a smart political leader would see an opportunity. America (or
whatever coalition gets there first) might re-invent herself as the
"responsible citizen" of the Earth. There are good, and unexpected
things that happen to wealth when stepping up and becoming the "moral
leader".
Its hard to put concrete numbers to it, but there are many ways you can generally draw connections from "intact wildlife ecosystems" to economic benefits on n-th order effects.
E.g.
- Less plastic in the ocean -> less microplastics in fish -> healthier people -> less cost due to sickness, and a more productive population
- Less fishing net debris in the ocean -> less species of turtles going extinct -> more tourism for turtle watching (IDK if that's a thing)
On some fronts with wildlife conservation you can also draw a more direct line. E.g. vulture conservation essentially pays for itself, as vultures do carcass cleanup of diseased animals for free (preventing the spread of the disease through the ecosystem, eventually reaching humans), where the equivalent cleanup would be quite expensive. My guess with ocean conservation is that the "direct economic benefit" is mostly in the realm of fish as food resource.
Maybe a dumb question, but why? I don't like that it exists, but isn't it self-contained? The main reason for cleaning it up seems to be quoted as [1], which oversimplfies to 'animals might eat plastic, and it affects them', and it will make microplastics. But these problems seem to be localized to the garbage patch. I could see it as a asbestos situation where its only problematic if you disturb it. Ongoing dumping seems to be a bigger problem as it's not localized.
Yea, desire to fix a lot of environmental issues is driven by worry about the unknown consequences, which can be a genuine reason but it's hard to know how much you can justify spending on it, and willful ignorance because worrying about the environment is fashionable. It might turn out to be harmless or even beneficial, you never know. The article says the plastic costs up to $2.5T annually but doesn't specify a lower bound, so I assume the minimum cost is negative. It doesn't help that reporters use these dirty salesman tricks to fool people the same way a shop having sale might advertise "up to 50% off all stock" when really only a small minority of products have such a big discount.
Readit News
[1]https://web.archive.org/web/20190618030308/https://news.nati...
But we also need to stop it happening again. Which means stopping fishing nets and plastic trash from being dumped in the sea by ships. And preventing plastic that is dumped into rivers in developing countries [1] from reaching the sea. These are hard problems.
[1] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aaz5803
In this particular case I think it’s worth specifically calling out The Philippines, who are responsible for a third of all ocean waste. India are second at ~12%, but also with a billion and a half people that’s a little more understandable
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_India
The patch was discovered 27 years ago (1997). So, $7 billion to clean it up, and then $250 million a year to keep it clean thereafter
To put 1% in more context, the biggest companies like P&G, Verizon, Progressive Insurance etc will never spend more that 3% of revenue MAXIMUM on their total marketing budget..and that is money that they directly measure ROI from.
So you never clean your toilet because it's just going to get dirty again?
> Data and modelling indicate that the removal of the GPGP could be achieved in 5 years at a cost of $4bn
We should do this at either price point, but ... what's the difference here? If we can do it faster and cheaper, why put the higher price quote in the headline? Is the 'data and modeling' including some extrapolation that assumes performance will increase meaningfully once they're started at scale?
1) We have been doing some cleaning and, based on our real results that we have recorded, we are saying it can be cleaned up for $7.5bn over 10 years.
2) Separately, we have also done some thinking and modeling about other approaches and we project that we could probably clean up the same area in less time for less money.
It's a huge area, where the water is filled with lots of tiny debris that is floating micro plastic chunks.
The plastic gets physically broken down by nature into sand size particles but then just gathers in that massive area due to water currents.
Here's John Cook's description:
So how dense is it? Let’s assume 80,000 metric tons over an area twice the size of Texas. The area of Texas is 700,000 km² , so that’s 8 × 10^10 grams of trash over 1.4 × 10^12 square meters, or 57 milligrams per square meter.
An empty water bottle weighs about 20 grams, and an American football field covers 5300 square meters, so this would be the same density of plastic as 15 empty water bottles scattered over a football field.
https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2018/09/10/density-of-the-gpg...
1/20th of a gram per square meter spread suspended in the top few meters of water is real, but it doesn't look anything like a floating garbage pile.
Even if the cost estimate of $7.5B is off by a factor of 2x or 3x, deploying this technology to clean up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch looks like a no-brainer to me. The long-term financial benefits for the world could be multiple orders of magnitude larger.
---
[a] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_garbage_patch
[b] https://theoceancleanup.com/updates/system-03-a-beginners-gu...
> Why is System 03 so much bigger than System 002?
> Size matters because cleaning the ocean becomes cheaper and more efficient with bigger systems. By making System 03 so much bigger than our previous efforts (alongside the multiple upgrades we’ve implemented) we can cover a much larger area of ocean in less time and using fewer resources – driving down our cost per kilogram of plastic removed and maximizing our benefit on the marine environment. System 002 proved our technology and demonstrated that cleaning the GPGP is feasible; System 03 aims to prove that it is also economically viable. Scaling up to this size is an essential step towards meeting that objective.
It's refreshing to see this vocabulary/way of talking used on an environmentalist website.
These are unknowable at these scales and levels of complexity. Such lack of imagination shouldn't be an obstacle to starting anyway. Some things are self-evidently "gonna be great".
I am fascinated by the era of National Projects, like Apollo and the Hoover (Boulder) dam. What we need in this world right now (other than love sweet love) is a massive feel-good project. 7bn is piffling small change in the context of projects like Apollo (the US Moon landings).
What we now understand about the "space race" in its cold-war context is that it was more about pride, signalling achievement and willpower than any actual strategic significance. Stuff you do "because you can".
William James penned "The Moral Equivalent of War" (which president Carter riffed on) in an era when there was so much less cynicism, disaffection, resignation and apathy, and when grand projects were something people got excited about, and got behind instead of shrugging "who will pay for it?"
Instead of seeing this as a chore, and arguing about whose garbage it is, a smart political leader would see an opportunity. America (or whatever coalition gets there first) might re-invent herself as the "responsible citizen" of the Earth. There are good, and unexpected things that happen to wealth when stepping up and becoming the "moral leader".
I'm curious how you came to this conclusion. What are the economic benefits and how are they linked to this patch in the middle of the Pacific?
E.g.
- Less plastic in the ocean -> less microplastics in fish -> healthier people -> less cost due to sickness, and a more productive population
- Less fishing net debris in the ocean -> less species of turtles going extinct -> more tourism for turtle watching (IDK if that's a thing)
On some fronts with wildlife conservation you can also draw a more direct line. E.g. vulture conservation essentially pays for itself, as vultures do carcass cleanup of diseased animals for free (preventing the spread of the disease through the ecosystem, eventually reaching humans), where the equivalent cleanup would be quite expensive. My guess with ocean conservation is that the "direct economic benefit" is mostly in the realm of fish as food resource.
I mean I think we should do it for the sake of it, but, I’m keen to know where you think we get financial benefits.
[1] - https://microplastics.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s435...