Ocean cleanup group removes record 25,000 pounds of trash from Great Pacific Garbage Patch in one extraction
Ocean cleanup group removes record 25,000 pounds of trash from Great Pacific Garbage Patch in one extraction
Ocean cleanup crews have fished out the most trash ever taken from one of the largest garbage patches in the world.
According to this website (https://www.condorferries.co.uk/plastic-in-the-ocean-statistics) 33 billion pounds of plastic enter the ocean each year.
So in the same timeframe that ocean cleanup extracted 25,000 pounds, 2.5 billion pounds were dumped.
I'm not saying its not a worthwhile exercise, but that's depressing.
Your article is a bit misleading with the mixing of denominations.
This article says they got about 50 tons in a month, so ~600 tons a year.
There's ~100-200 million tons of plastic in the ocean now, with a further 14 million tons being added every year (33 billion pounds in metric tons).
14 million tons at 600 removed a year for 1 boat is 23k years. But at 23k boats that's 1 year. There are about 6k shipping monstrosities out on the oceans at any given time, 50k ships navigate the oceans every year.
If we increase the yield of these boats by just 2 fold, these numbers start making sense to fix within a lifetime, which is amazing. Without counting the reduction in waste added we can easily fix.
Humanity should have expected the cleanup to take as many generations if not more than it took to put plastic in, we're lucky we can get this close.
This is not greenwashing.
Ocean cleanup is also working on systems to prevent plastic from leaving rivers and flowing into the oceans.
It's just meaningless greenwashing.
A feel-good gesture that ultimately does squat in helping anyone or anything but it sure makes entitled people feel superior about themselves.... I cleaned up the oceans, praise me!
no, you're wrong. This organization is basically still experimenting, and they have come a long way over the years. There are also efforts to trap plastics at mouths of rivers to try and slow down polluting the ocean. There is hope yet.
Posted above, but that 33 billion is there to scare ppl, which also has the effect of giving people like you excuses to be synical.
The difference is it's 33 billion pounds, which is ~14 million metric TONS.
If you do the math it start looking achievable, and this is just some startup that gets its funding through charity. Imagine what the worlds governments could do taking this seriously. We could clean the ocean within a generation, which is amazing considering.
There's a lot of greenwashing out there, this isn't it. You might want to look up the definition of greenwashing.
And they took it to a local garbage dump, which then got shipped off to China, and then thrown right back into the ocean.
25000pounds = 11339.8 kg