#Oceanwire is a great source for ocean environmental news

[beechichi]

Not to be a huge downer but while this stuff is cool with really great intentions, I implore folks to listen to what the marine scientists have also been saying about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. This situation is a lot more complicated than we understand. There is surprisingly a ton of biodiversity inside of it and widely scooping it all up is destroying a lot of life as well. There is no one-size-fits-all solution to the plastic problem but please read these threads/article: https://twitter.com/RebeccaRHelm/status/1654539722985963535 https://twitter.com/RebeccaRHelm/status/1653861661118218247 https://peerj.com/articles/15021/

Basically a lot more study needs to be done before we can just collect a ton of plastic and call it a day. Like Rebecca said in her tweets, we could be bulldozing a meadow and not even know it. I'm all for cleaning up plastic in the ocean. But let's do it carefully.

““The Great Pacific Garbage Patch can now be cleaned,” announced Dutch entrepreneur Boyan Slat, the wonderkid inventor who’s spent a decade inventing systems for waterborne litter collection.

Recent tests on his Ocean Cleanup rig called System 002, invented to tackle the 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic pollution, were a success, leading Slat to predict that most of the oceanic garbage patches could be removed by 2040.

Intersections of ocean currents have created the massive floating islands of plastic trash—five slow-moving whirlpools that pull litter from thousands of miles away into a single radius.

The largest one sits between California and Hawaii, and 27-year-old Slat has been designing and testing his systems out there, launching from San Francisco since 2013.

GNN has reported on his original design for the floating device, but his engineering team improved upon it. System 002, nicknamed “Jenny,” successfully netted 9,000 kilograms, or around 20,000 pounds in its first trial.

It’s carbon-neutral, able to capture microplastics as small as 1 millimeter in diameter, and was designed to pose absolutely no threat to wildlife thanks to its wide capture area, slow motion, alerts, and camera monitors that allow operators to spy any overly-curious marine life…

Slat estimates ten Jennies could clean half the garbage patch in five years, and if 10 Jennies were deployed to the five major ocean gyres, then 90% of all floating plastic could be removed by 2040.” -via Good News Network, 10/19/21