An Ocean Cleanup vessel trailing a huge boom behind it to collect plastics from the Pacific (Image: The Ocean Cleanup)
Shoes, toilet seats, watering cans, bowling balls and boxes tumble to the ship’s deck in a mountainous riot of colour. There are ropes, buoys, abandoned fishing gear, shredded nets and bottles, bits and bobs and thingamabobs. The giant trawling boom 1.4 miles in length is reeled in, slowly disgorging its catch. But this is no fishing vessel that has suffered an unfortunate haul.
The Maersk Tender is one of two ships employed by the non-profit group The Ocean Cleanup to tackle the seemingly insurmountable task of removing plastic debris from the environmental catastrophe known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
An estimated 100,000 tons of plastic is believed to be trapped by ocean currents in the North Pacific Gyre between California and Hawaii, endangering sea life and threatening to pollute the food chain that millions of people rely on worldwide.
The Patch sprawls across an estimated 620,000 square miles of ocean: a blight more than six times the size of Britain. Without fanfare, The Ocean Cleanup recently completed its 100th trawl of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, removing almost one million pounds of plastic refuse from the area since launching its first mission in 2019.
But is it too late to save the Pacific? Is the damage simply irreparable?
“For 60 years, it has only gotten worse and worse,” admits Boyan Slat, 30, the Dutch inventor and founder of The Ocean Cleanup. “Now hopefully we’re turning the tide. While we still have a long way to go, our recent successes fill us with renewed confidence that the oceans can be cleaned. After many tough years of trial and error, it’s amazing to see our work is starting to pay off.”
Each seven-week mission sends two ships sailing into the heart of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. They unreel a giant U-shaped boom trailing a 10ft deep “skirt” that traps plastic in a Brobdingnagian “sock” but allows fish to escape. Trawling often rough seas, the vessels haul in their catch, teeming withplastic flotsam.
The harvest can be bizarrely diverse. Container vessels that lose shipping containers in violent storms annually unleash thousands of items into the sea. Garish Croc shoes, plastic squirt guns, turkey decoys for hunters and bicycle helmets have washed ashore across the globe.
A staggering 29,000 yellow plastic ducks famously roamed the oceans for years after a container fell overboard from a vessel travelling from Hong Kong to America in 1992.
The Ocean Clean-up: Vessel removes rubbish from the Pacific Ocean
But the Pacific gyre, where three major ocean currents converge, acts like a giant whirlpool that can trap such debris, creating the ecological nightmare that is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. It is a danger to sea life, and mankind.
Marine life can be trapped in plastic garbage, especially discarded “ghost” fishing nets that continue to capture and kill dolphins, porpoises and whales. Turtles can mistake plastic bags for prey, such as jellyfish.
Disturbingly, the Patch is not a floating island of rubbish, but is more like an oceanic soup. Though hard plastics can survive in the ocean for decades, they gradually break down into microplastics – tiny pieces smaller than 5mm in size – that are eaten by fish and sea birds, not realising that they are not food and have no nutritional value.
Worse, microplastics break down into nanoplastics, which can enter fishes’ muscle tissues and find their way into the food chain, winding up in our fishmongers, sushi restaurants and supermarkets.
These microplastics make up a staggering 94% of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, according to the WorldWildlife Fund.
They can carry toxic chemicals, heavy metals and pollutants that in humans may cause liver and intestinal damage, or lead to cancers, infertility and poor foetal development.
Ocean Cleanup finds itself in a race against time to rid the oceans of hard plastic debris before it deteriorates into a microplastic stew that poisons the oceans for decades.
Aiming to clear 90% of plastics from the world’s oceans by 2040, Ocean Cleanup CEO Boyan Slat is undaunted by scientists who believe the task is overwhelming.
“When people say something is impossible, the sheer absoluteness of that statement should be a motivation to investigate further,” he insists. Yet Slat has no illusions about the rough seas ahead. In 2018, he predicted that his operation could cut the Patch in half by 2025. He now believes that, with the help of more clean-up ships, it could take at least another 10 years to clear, though the addition of AI and drones could keep it to five.
It won’t be cheap. Ocean Cleanup reckons it will cost almost £6billion to eliminate the Patch.
However, Slat argues: “Ocean plastic pollution is one of the most urgent problems our oceans face today, costing the world up to £1.9trillion per year in damage to economies, to industries, and to the environment.” Eliminating plastics from the seven seas remains a daunting prospect.
The Ocean Cleanup traps and collects the rubbish bit by bit (Image: The Ocean Cleanup)
Ocean Cleanup’s giant boom collects the larger pieces of debris closest to the surface, yet plastic fills the entire water column, going down thousands of feet to the seabed. And the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is not alone.
Another, smaller though still monumental debris patch hovers in the Western Pacific off the coast of Japan; there are two more patches in the Atlantic; and a fifth stagnates in the Indian Ocean. Up to 90% of plastics entering the world’s oceans come from refuse dumped into rivers, according to scientific research. The rest comes from fishing vessels and offshore rigs, factories and household waste.
A UN resolution to eliminate ocean plastic pollution was signed by 193 countries in 2017 and yet each year the Patch has grown in size. Imagine a dustbin lorry depositing a full load of plastic refuse into the ocean every minute – that is the UN’s estimate of more than eight million tons of plastic entering the seas every year.
An important first step is for people to stop adding to the problem, researchers claim.
“By acting to prevent marine debris,we can stop this problem from growing,” said the US National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration in a recent statement. “We are the problem, and so we must also be the solution.”
Ocean Cleanup has also created giant floating “interceptor” booms that gather and remove vast quantities of plastic trash from the world’s great rivers before it reaches the oceans. The organisation believes 80% of all ocean trash stems from just 1,000 rivers.
As of August, the group has collected more than 16,000 tons of trash from global rivers and seas. The group also aims to recycle much of the plastic it recovers.
British rockers Coldplay, who financially support Ocean Cleanup’s river-cleansing efforts, recently released a limited edition vinyl LP of their latest album – Moon Music – made from recycled river plastic. Three years ago, the British band sponsored Interceptor 005, a floating barrier to capture rubbish from a Malaysian river before it reaches the ocean.
Coldplay said at the time: “Without action, there could be more plastic than fish in the oceans by 2050, which is why The Ocean Cleanup’s work is so vital. We’re proud to sponsor Interceptor 005 – aka Neon Moon 1 – which will catch thousands of tons of waste before it reaches the ocean.”
Rubbish collected from the floating ocean garbage site (Image: The Ocean Cleanup)
Car manufacturer Kia also debuted an SUV boot liner made from recycled ocean plastic.
Intriguingly, the plastics in the Patch have endured long enough to develop their own ecosystem, with around 40 different organisms, from mussels and barnacles to crabs, living on the floating trash.
Ironically, scientists are now concernedthat cleaning up the plastic refuse willdestroy a thriving oceanic biome that calls the Patch its home.
“We are not looking at the problem holistically if plastic clean-up organisations do not consider species’ livelihoods,” cautions ecologist Professor Brian Griffith of Georgetown University, Washington DC.
And even if all the hard plastic debris is removed, our oceans could still brim with hazardous microplastics for generations to come.
Despite the tsunami of challenges, Ocean Cleanup’s Boyan Slat is optimistic.
“We have shown the world that the impossible is now possible,” he adds. “We call upon the world to relegate the Great Pacific Garbage Patch to the history books. This environmental catastrophe has been allowed to exist, unresolved, for too long.”
