Do you want to save the garden from plastic – can harm animals

How do you clean 1,800 billion plastic pieces – weighing 80,000 tons – from the Pacific Ocean? With a U-shaped tube 600 meters long, the organization hopes to find itself in the largest liquid in the world, the "plastberg".

But experts doubt that this is the solution.

A plastic collection three times larger than Sweden currently flows between Hawaii and California. But maybe not for so long.

The Dutch organization The Ocean Cleanup recently launched a project to allow a tube to flow freely over the ocean, following winds, waves and currents, just like plastic.

In this way, the pipe will end where the junk food ends. Under the tube is a kind of three-meter long net intended to wrap the plastic, which is then transported. The project plans to capture about five tons of plastic in this way.

critical

The hope is that this method will eventually lead to the disappearance of half of all plastics in the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" by here five years. Researchers and environmental organizations, however, find problems with the project, accused of diverting attention from what really needs to be done: stop the influx of plastic into the garden.

"It's like sitting in a boat sinking and getting out of the water without repairing the hole, we have to fight the tide," says Bethanie Carney Almroth, a plastic researcher in the garden of the United States. University of Gothenburg.

Ocean Cleanup says their method contains engines or machines and is the only reasonable way to free the ocean from the world of plastic. Ambitions go beyond the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. By 2021, it is assumed that 60 hoses will be used and in 2040, it is hoped that more than 90% of all marine plastics will have been removed, combined with smaller wastes also ending there.

Located at the bottom

But that's always the bad end to start, says Carney Almroth. She points out that only 1% of all plastics are on the surface of the water, so this is only a small part of the problem. At the same time, about 8 million tons of new plastic are in the garden each year.

– You should not communicate this as a solution. This is not it. 94% of the plastic in the ocean is on the seabed and we will not get it. They can take what is great, but not so difficult.

The last five percent of the plastic is rinsed along the ribs and can therefore be recovered from there.

The project has also been criticized for damaging animals and plankton. Bethanie Carney Almroth shares the concerns expressed by researchers and environmental organizations.

"I do not know how to distinguish plastic from things that should stay, like animals and algae, for example, floating algae that build large bottoms important to species in the Atlantic Ocean. such things destroy an entire ecosystem, she warns.

Defends

However, The Ocean Cleanup believes that their technology ensures that fish and other animals are not damaged or caught in the tube.

– Plankton and other marine species are already affected by liquid waste. We will use the knowledge gained from the project to minimize the future impact, commented the head of operations, Lonneke Holierhoek, who criticizes the British Guardian.

Great Pacific Garbage Patch is considered the most complete of the five major plastic collections in the global ocean. They are due to the ocean currents, and thus to the larger "junk food islands" of the five supertropical vortices. But he also accumulated a larger amount of plastic to the Swede Bohuskusten. But there are no compact plastic layers.

"Plaster is both dispersed and concentrated and looks more like broth," said Carney Almroth.

October 26, 2018 6:00 am