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> In my opinion, that's better than doing nothing at all.
This attitude is wrong IMO. The issue with high-profile half-baked interventions is that they distract from real unsexy solutions like grab the plastic in rivers BEFORE they make it to the ocean.
This is self-evident from data on their own website! https://theoceancleanup.com/sources/ . River mouths/estuaries are also some of the most densely populated regions in the world. This bites in that it is easy for plastic to enter the ocean. But it's also a lot easier to run cleanup at the source, next to humans, rather than 3000km away in the middle of the ocean.
They pivoted to mostly river cleanup (interceptors) many years ago. And they clearly show that it is just one step back, not a full time solution. Ocean cleanup is last step, river grab is the step before that and having proper garbage collection would be best.
Which is literally written in TFA:
> Now they mostly intercept plastic when it first leaves rivers and enters the ocean instead of trying to scoop it out of the middle of the ocean, though the open ocean work is still mentioned on their website
"The results, published last November in Environmental Science & Technology, show that rivers collectively dump anywhere from 0.47 million to 2.75 million metric tons of plastic into the seas every year, depending on the data used in the models. The 10 rivers that carry 93 percent of that trash are the Yangtze, Yellow, Hai, Pearl, Amur, Mekong, Indus and Ganges Delta in Asia, and the Niger and Nile in Africa. The Yangtze alone dumps up to an estimated 1.5 million metric tons of plastic waste into the Yellow Sea."
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/stemming-the-plas...
Worrying about cleanup without worrying about why we have to clean it up in the first place is a losing approach. It reads as just 'recycle better' without wondering why consumers have that burden in the first place.
When you drive at night you kill a huge amount of insects. But we don't consider this harmful.
So the real question is: do they save more animals by removing the plastic.
By the way: there are a lot of scientists involved in the Ocean Cleanup team. So I don't think they overlook the fact that they catch animals.
You mean they distract from doing… exactly what they are doing?
Maybe give a team that has been working on this problem for 10+ years enough credit to check what they are doing before dismissing them.
I read the first linked article where these experts in ocean plastic and ocean engineering supposedly give their great insights, back in 2015. It lists "6 Reasons That Floating Ocean Plastic Cleanup Gizmo is a Horrible Idea" (what a headline!). But the six reasons are either unhelpful, unconstructive, arguments in bad faith, silly, or exactly the sort of stop energy that activists specialize in. They were:
1. Ocean plastic doesn't behave the way the project's backers say it does.
Ocean Cleanup said the amount of plastic drops off exponentially fast after three meters of depth. The rebuttal of the expert oceanographers is that they stopped looking after five meters (as you'd expect if it drops off sharply after three), and that plastic can also be found at 100m of depth. This is presented as mistake by Ocean Cleanup but obviously isn't. Neither fact is incompatible with nearly all the plastic being in shallow depths.
Then they ding it because the machine as designed can't capture pieces of plastic smaller than 2cm, although lots of plastic has degraded to tiny particles. This is the nirvana fallacy in action: you aren't planning a perfect solution to the problem, therefore you're misleading people when you say you're going to tackle it. Only childish people think like this. Engineers know no solution is ever perfect.
2. The collectors will break really quickly
In 2004 the booms in the feasibility study weren't specced to a level that could survive large storms. It was designed to raise money and see if any plastic could be collected at all, so this is expected. Then it says Boyan Slat planned to do the 2015 test in the "relatively protected waters of the Korean Strait" i.e. somewhere large storms wouldn't necessarily be a problem. This isn't a critique.
3. The project will harm wildlife
By wildlife they mean plankton. This is a ridiculous and bad faith argument, the sort of critique that could apply to literally any object in the ocean including sperm whales.
4. Recyclers don't want the plastic
So? It can be landfilled. The goal is to get it out of the ocean, not create new Coke bottles. This critique makes no sense.
5. There's a far more effective way
They mean getting volunteers to pick trash off beaches. Very NGO mindset: why mechanize when you can hold a splashy single-day event and make everyone feel good about themselves. It was obvious why that doesn't work. The link they give to find the next event is a 404 and the NGO website containing it no longer mentions any beach cleanup events. Instead the "Take Action Against Plastics" section of their site now asks people to lobby Congress.
6. It's better to not put plastic in the ocean in the first place
Obviously. But people do, which is why the project exists. This is not a reason why trying to remove plastic from the ocean is a "horrible idea".
So: six arguments, of which the best is that the initial PoC wasn't built to production specifications - the sort of argument only people who have never built anything make. I don't see any reason to side against Slat here.
I think the Ocean Cleanup has been one of the most effective (non- political/commercial) PR campaigns of the last decade.
There will always be misallocation of resources in the private and public sector, I think the main point of this article is "trusting the experts in complex situations", which in my opinion is valid and needs to be said more emphatically in the current political climate.
“There was this spirit at the time that a few well-meaning young people with a lot of passion would find solutions, but for complex problems like this one, the teenage geniuses and their billionaire backers aren’t going to save us, and they’re going to take us on a wild and expensive ride along the way,” Helm says.
TY for saying this. I am having an especially hard time right now because this is my attitude as well and it seems; even here on HN that its now cool to literally just not try. Complain, call everything AI-slop and just concede defeat to Altman, Dario and Zuck. I literally had someone tell me its stupid and pointless to try and build efficiencies into systems like Medicare etc... and we should just wait on "mind-control". At a time when the barrier to entry and the cost of just fucking trying has never been lower it seems like there are more people than ever just waiting to tear everything down and recruit you into their cult of apathetic misery.
The alternative is not "doing nothing at all." It's spending the money effectively and in ways that don't kill marine life. TFA gives an example near the end:
"So if we can’t scoop all the plastic trash out of the ocean without killing large numbers of marine animals, what can we do instead?
One effective (and cost-effective) solution is the Ocean Conservancy’s International Coastal Cleanup. This amazing program has removed more than 400 million pounds of trash from beaches, where it’s much easier to access than in the middle of the ocean, before it gets swept back to sea. They do this at incredibly low cost, because more than 19 million people around the world have volunteered to help.
“Our total annual budget for all our plastics advocacy work, which includes cleanup, science and policy efforts, is about $6 million,” says Jordana Lewis, director of communications for the Ocean Conservancy Director of Communications. “Every organization contributing to the International Coastal Cleanup does things a little differently, but for every $2 invested Ocean Conservancy can remove a pound of trash from the environment and invest in scientific research and upstream policy solutions to prevent plastics from being produced and/or entering our ocean in the first place.”
As of this writing, The Ocean Cleanup reports it has removed 117.3 million pounds of waste from the ocean and (mostly) rivers. The nonprofit spent more than $72 million across its 2022-2024 fiscal years, according to tax filings.
Meanwhile Dr. Richards points out that in 2024 Ocean Cleanup’s System 002 “was out there spewing diesel fumes from a ship that cost $100,000 a day, picking up less plastic than a bunch of volunteers on beaches.” (A representative for the Ocean Cleanup told me via email that they are working on improving the cost efficiency of their operations.)"
That math doesn't show what the author might want it to - The Ocean Cleanup removed ~118Mlbs of waste for $72m, while it would take $246M to do the same with the "incredibly low cost" methods of the Ocean Conservancy?
It is true that The Ocean Cleanup "we're going to trawl the ocean for plastic" approach isn't working terribly well.
But they did pivot to stopping trash from washing out of rivers and into the ocean which is working. Stopping the mess from growing is also a very good thing.
This seems like some combination of the enemy of good is perfect and also sour grapes that someone else is doing the thing.
Issues are hard. PR is easy, especially if you hand-wave over the hard stuff.
This is a great summary of lots of flashy commercial and non-profit work. Proposal for a product: AI-assisted "Who is already doing this?" database. Extra credit for linking to audited annual reports.
It took a bit of digging, but it looks like around 80% of the plastic the Ocean Cleanup has captured comes from rivers - while the article focuses mostly on criticizing the open ocean catch. It would be interesting to see what is the budget split between the two methods, but I couldn't easily find it.
It makes sense to me that removal requiring infrastructure will be more costly than unpaid volunteers on land. It is NOT clear to me if that means the infrastructure solution is not worth pursuing in parallel. It does seem the open ocean catch is ineffective compared to the river capture, and I can understand that argument. Not so clear to me if / why river capture should be scrapped in favor of the volunteer beach cleanup, as the article seems to imply. Intuitively, pursuing both would makes more sense. Again, this would be a very interesting analysis to see.
> Unfortunately, it also shows how some people can take certain ideas too closely to heart — and take it personally when those ideas are criticized. When experts started speaking out about the Ocean Cleanup several years ago, I witnessed several of them endure online harassment from supporters of the organization, often phrased as “At least they’re trying to do something to help, all you do is complain.”
To be honest, yes, this article seems to be getting the same response. Doesn't mean the criticism is invalid, but public communication is a skill in itself, separate from depth of expertise in a subject.
Germany, for example, has facilities that can automatically sort plastic both by type and color, which is quite impressive.
.... I am sorry, but how can that impress you? That would be impressive in 1990. Today, with deep learning and all AI, I would consider having robots open trash bags and sort whatever is inside for more processing (e.g. organic waste, plastic and so on, depending on how dirty it is) only slightly impressive. Unlike Amazon pick up challange, they don't need to be perfect.
It is literally in the local culture to just throw trash into the gutters. You can pick up as much as you want, but there will be 1000x more thrown into the rivers and flushed into the oceans. Changing the culture of people who are living moment-to-moment on absolutely nothing at all, isn't realistic either.
Depressing AF, but far better to spend our time focused on other things than just trying to clean it up.
Listen to experts. At least they recognize the "I told you so".
Right, trust the experts, who appear to be more interested in their own expertise than people at least trying to do something, trying to create better technology, and trying to educate the public on plastic ocean waste.
What's the point of this article again?
As long as we're using natural gas, there be a surplus of cheap ethane and we'll indirectly subsidize plastic, since making plastic out of the ethane puts that waste product to use (by creating plastic waste instead).
Update: a small grammar fix.
Cleaning the ocean, yeah right... tackle the fishing industry first.