This story was originally published in Slate, and reproduced here with the Climate Desk collaboration. Rebecca Helm hates the term “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” which is used to describe a vast stretch of ocean between the West Coast of North America and Japan that is filled with an estimated 1,8 trillion pieces of garbage.
[[{“value”:”This article, which was first published by Slate, is being reprinted below as a part of the Climate Desk partnership.
The phrase” Great Pacific Garbage Patch” is abhorred by Rebecca Helm.
An estimated 1.8 trillion pieces of trash, the majority of which are cheap, are crammed into this moniker, which is used to describe the vast ocean that stretches from North America’s West Coast to Japan.
According to marine biologist Helm from Georgetown University’s Earth Commons Institute, “naming a region of the world after something negative that has happened to it is truly awful practice.”
She also believes that this term misrepresents the region as a desolate wasteland when, in reality, it is home to an abundance of aquatic life in addition to discarded Styrofoam cups, filthy fishing nets, and floating plastic bottles. This area, which is actually known as” the North Pacific High,” is home to a diverse variety of tiny species that live at the sea’s surface, from electric-blue seadragons to tiny snails that ride bubbles like rafts across the open ocean, in addition to the occasional shark or sea turtle passerby.
But, groups attempting to clean up this area face a sophisticated conundrum due to the teeming nature of life there.
There are now many businesses and organizations using devices to remove pollution from the empty ocean, including the Ocean Cleanup, a nonprofit that gradually skims the water’s surface and collects foam in the North Pacific.
Helm emphasizes the importance of ocean plastic removal but expresses concern over how this technology is affecting the neuston, a group of aquatic life that lives on the ocean’s surface. In a 2019 issue of The Atlantic, she expressed her worries about the Ocean Cleanup, saying that” we cannot monitor this ecosystem with our existing technology, and millions of animals may die and dissolve before the scale of destruction is completely understood.”
” You will not be able to clean it all up if you put more and more plastics into the system,” said Sisyphean.
On their website, The Ocean Cleanup published a response to her article that refuted many of her assertions. Helm is n’t the only one who feels that the environmental effects of the Ocean Cleanup and other ocean plastic removal technologies on the market are underappreciated, despite the fact that this is still the case several years later.
Helm and a group of foreign marine experts published remark in November that these ocean cleanup devices are erroneous. It was released a week before the most recent round of United Nations plastics negotiations, which took place in Nairobi and drew more than 175 nations together to discuss an international agreement to address the foam issue.
The commentary also brought up prospective biodiversity risks, particularly those brought on by bycatch, or unintentional marine life capture. The effectiveness of removal technologies in meaningfully cleaning up plastic was even questioned by the authors. For instance, according to one study, it would take 200 Ocean Cleanup devices, operating for 130 years, to capture only 5 % of the floating plastics in the world, which would emit a sizable amount of carbon emissions.
According to Melanie Bergmann, a biologist at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany and the commentary’s lead author,” If the bathtub is overflowing, you turn off the tap first before you start mopping the floor.” ” You will not be able to clean it all up if you put more and more plastics into the system,” said Sisyphean.
The head of economic and social affairs at the Ocean Cleanup, Matthias Egger, asserts that the organization has a unique philosophy:” It’s certainly an either-or.” ” We consider ourselves to be a short-term endeavor.” If you do not even address the root of the issue, you cannot clean up eternally; however, we must do both.
Boyan Slat, a 16-year-old French inventor and businessman, founded the organization in 2013 with the goal of eliminating 90 % of floating ocean plastic pollution by 2040. The Ocean Cleanup now merely runs one plastic retrieval system, which makes recurring trips to the North Pacific every six weeks. However, their ultimate objective is to scale up to 10 devices, each backed by 20 ships. Like a “weather forecast button for acrylic,” according to Egger, mathematical models are used to assist in predicting the locations of this region’s highest concentrations of plastic.
According to one study, one organism was caught for every four pieces of plastic the device snatched, and 73 % of those caught died within two days.
The Ocean Cleanup is n’t the only plastic removal game in town, despite being the most well-known. In recent years, the market has been inundated with gadgets, from freely skimming the sea surface by Dutch company RanMarine to floating garbage bins that filter out debris developed by American company Seabin. According to a report from Earth, removing plastic from the ocean can improve habitat quality in several ways and benefit ocean species by lowering the risk of foam entanglement or ingestion, which kills 100,000 marine animals annually. org.
However, the ecosystems that these devices are attempting to safeguard could even be harmed. The Ocean Cleanup’s operations took more than 335, 000 pounds of plastic in 2023. However, according to a report from the organization, the system even caught 2, 866 pounds of extraneous bycatch between July 2021 and December 2023, including fish, mollusks, crustaceans, and barnacles. For every four pieces of plastic that the device snatched, one organism was also caught, and 73 % of the organisms that were caught were dead after two days, according to a University of Plymouth study from 2022.
The authors of the commentary claim that while this pales in comparison to the level of bycatch from nets used by the fishing industry, the amount of marine life unwittingly caught by plastic removal technology is still harming ecosystems and that the long-term effects of these devices are still not fully understood.
Richard Thompson, a marine researcher at the University of Plymouth and co-author on the Seabin study, as well as the most recent commentary, says that “before we start to roll out things that purport to be solutions, it’s absolutely vital that we’ve got clear, independent medical evidence to guide us. We know that those solutions are positively effective and that they’re not just making the problem worse.”
The Seabin team just changed its business model from selling the devices to users all over the world to concentrating operations on densely crowded cities, using Sydney’s harbor in Australia as a pilot, in response to biodiversity risks, including those listed in the report by Thompson.
Here, the business performs routine trash servicing and collection in its own units.
Pete Ceglinski, the CEO and co-founder of Seabin, claims that it “turned into a huge liability because we did n’t know where the seabins were being sold.” There are still many Seabins that they have n’t been able to get back, according to Ceglinski, but they started doing so in 2020. He continues,” Today, the company’s revenue comes from business and government clients, who pay to help operate the machines and are able to tell their customers that they support plastic removal efforts.”
According to Bergmann, it is a popular and difficult trend for plastic-removal technology companies that Seabin has never carried out or ordered an environmental impact assessment for its devices. On the other hand, each time the Ocean Cleanup creates a new model, the marine consulting firm CSA Ocean Sciences conducts its own economic impact assessments. The nonprofit has added measures to try to reduce bycatch, such as underwater cameras and clean LED lights to improve equipment visibility, as it has created new iterations of its system.”}]] This article, which was first published by Slate, is being reprinted these as a part of the Climate Desk partnership. Rebecca Helm abhors the expression” Great Pacific Garbage Patch.” This moniker is used to describe the great ocean that stretches from the West Coast of North America to Japan and is estimated to contain 1.8 trillion pieces of trash.
This story was originally published in Slate, and reproduced here with the Climate Desk collaboration. Rebecca Helm hates the term “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” which is used to describe a vast stretch of ocean between the West Coast of North America and Japan that is filled with an estimated 1,8 trillion pieces of garbage.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/02/ocean-plastics-cleanup-harming-marine-life-organisms/
