Yes, please!

It's a super initiative, I truly hope that it achievable.

However, how does one educate people to a level where they will no longer use the ocean as a garbage disposal unit ?

It should be a achievable in the 1st world countries , the 2nd and 3rd world present a whole other set of problems.

We were recently in Thailand and as much as it is a beautiful country it appears as though zero effort is made to ask people to not throw plastic and rubbish into the roadside. I would presume that most of the neighbourimg countries are the same. We saw the same thing in Egypt and Morocco.

Is it just a case of financial dynamics or are the rich countries just better at shipping of their shit to other countries.

I look at the rubbish strewn across the roadsides here in semi-rural Buckinghamshire and your definition leads me to consider that the UK is perhaps not a 1st world country :/

I contrast that to our travels in southern Germany, Austria and Switzerland this summer where the roadsides were absolutely spotless by comparison. We spent the best part of a week at an Austrian lake and I didn't see a single item of rubbish in the water, at all, and I really was trying to spot anything by the end.

Part of that is the people in those countries take some pride in their surroundings. Over here in blighty we have become accustomed to 'it is someone else's problem'.

Yes, I seem to remember the statistic is that [1]90% of all river-borne plastic that ends up in the ocean comes from just 10 rivers , eight of them in Asia. If that doesn't stop, then it seems like cleaning the GPGP up will be a bit futile, as it will soon be replaced by GPGP 2.0. Worth a shot anyway, I suppose.

[1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/06/90-of-plastic-polluting-our-oceans-comes-from-just-10-rivers/

A later paper showed this wasn't really true, that almost all plastic actually comes from upstream rivers and more distributed than the pretty sensationalist "10 rivers" story.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aaz5803

On my Sunday morning bike ride I'm always depressed to find my first world countrymen (and women) have decided to decorate the local lanes with the remains of their Saturday night takeaway.

And hope they succeed. But I do have a couple of questions:

- what do they do with the plastic they remove? Hopefully a lot of it can be recycled?

- is there an ecosystem associated with the patch, similarly to the plants and animals living in/on the Sargasso weeds? And if so, what happens to them? Or is the plastic more of a menace than a place to live?

Just curious...

Since the stuff has to be unloaded, identify a useful port or even suitable bit of coast to build a port, somewhere sunny and build a suitable solar powered plastics recycling facility producing lots of plastic lumber for rotproof construction..

It most definitely does. I believe that Humans, as a species, need to stop just doing whatever because of immediate satisfaction.

We have a responsibility, due to our absolute ability to get stuff done. Bears shit in the woods ? We can remove the forest if we feel like it. We're doing that in some places on this planet. We need to better understand the consequences of our actions.

We're supposed to be intelligent. When I see someone throwing a cigarette butt out of a car window, I wonder if that is really true. We act like none of our actions have any consequence. A cigarette butt ? It's nothing. Out the window it goes. But it is something, we just don't realize exactly what the consequences are.

We need to learn the consequences of our everyday lives, and adapt to the better side of those consequences.

It's for our own good. Because reading that 75% of Italian mothers have microplastics in their breast milk is something that really does not sound good to me.

It is, however, the consequence of our own ignorance.

So stop being ignorant and do something about it.

A very large % of microplastics come from washing clothes. The problem is a lot bigger than bottles and ciggy butts.

I've been following this project since the start and am thrilled to see it come to the fruition it promised originally. A bit like the "reforesting the Sahara" project in my eyes, it's one of the big environmental wins that can be had today that seems to fit a slightly more "repair" approach than to change what we're currently doing en-masse (like changing power generation methods or propulsion technologies). I'm genuinely excited about it and really happy they're getting the traction they need - hopefully the investment follows.

I've seen some of their other solutions, such as placing collection technologies at the mouth of some of the most contributing rivers and collecting stuff before it hits the oceans too.

I for one wonder if quietly offering some of the oldest or most interesting plastics found in their collections back to their original manufacturers for a sizeable donation would be a strong business model. The Ocean Cleanup Project gains some funds, some plastics are removed, and the removed items can either be placed in the corporation's respective museums (if they're ballsy and want to own it), or for those genuinely minded to do better, put on display in a pedestal or glass cabinet somewhere near their exec teams and ESG functions. Anything not quietly purchased by the corporations could be turned in to an exhibition that could tour major cities (London, LA, NYC, Beijing, Sydney, etc) for a month at a time, and funds from ticket sales could be used to further the project? Each tour section could have a specially-curated regional section, such as China seeing brands that are local to the far East highlighted in promotional materials and curated at the entrance. *Really* ballsy companies could pay *and* leave their interesting pieces in charge of the exhibition to help people understand why lobbing stuff in the nearest river isn't a great call.

I know I was morbidly fascinated when recently I tackled our huge hedge and pulled out a 1977 special-edition Matey bottle (genuinely) so would be interested to see what they'd found *and which companies stuff was part of it*.

FWIW, another commenter asked about 2nd/3rd world and why it's an issue. There are myraid first-world-being-a-problem things so I don't want to seem high and mighty here - I know enough global issues stem from everywhere. Seems for my understanding there's a "someone else will sort this" food chain sort of mindset in some parts. Some are rich enough that they can throw waste wherever knowing that someone else will collect all the plastic to go weigh it in as their job. Similarly, first-world bin placement and sanitation efforts are usually stronger across the spectrum, whereas they're weaker in poorer areas where civic funds are harder to come by: placing and emptying bins isn't as much a priority when children are starving and money could be spent on that. I doubt we'd get the UK to stand a Japanese attitude, where there are no bins and you *will* take your rubbish to your home or workplace. How to tackle the civic change, I don't know, but until done, fostering beach-clean-up crews and placing river-mouth collection goes a long way to improve things.

We quite often see various exhibitions on the south bank here in Nodnol that highlight the plight of various cultures / animals / buildings etc. Furthermore, when the Tate first opened, it had an exhibition of everything they'd pulled out of the Thames when building the Clipper pier (which I did, and still do find more interesting than anything else that's been in there)

We have to highlight this And we have to educate. And educate. And educate. And Punish

(I don't know if anyone else noticed the high amount of fishing nets that were encasing the turtles)

It's a nice idea, but most plastics sink. They're only dealing with the superficial, immediately visible problem, like we usually do. For the money they spent on it, they could have developed better technologies to clean up the small upstream rivers the plastics are coming from (~95% according to two studies in 2018 and 2020). Unless we deal with it at the source, we're just going to keep making new garbage patches and losing the majority of plastics under the surface. Not to mention the harm the plastics do in the rivers as well.

Which ultimately not producing the muck in the first place.

Plastics weren't really a thing until after WW2 so really they can only have been "indispensable" for seventy years and within living memory.

Even in my childhood containers were glass and wrapping was (waxed) paper or cellophane. Revisiting some old technologies in the light more recent chemistry could produce far more environmentally friendly solutions. I can imagine materials based on biological waxes and (modified) cellulose could displace a large proportion of gratuitous plastics usage on cost alone.

Anyway icecream did taste better from a waxed cardboard carton. ;)

Curiously I recall these cartons being referred to as a quart which would have been 2 imperial pints or 40 imp. fl.oz. but I remember they were only about 1 litre so were probably 2 US pints - an oddity in our remote but very British corner of the Empire.

I get it, most of these attempts are poorly disguised VC-harvesting tools.

But this lot have already designed, built, and tested river interceptors. The first one was years ago. And they're still developing and deploying them. And trying to persuade cities to stop dumping truckloads of garbage in rivers after collection.

Ocean Cleanup and their partners actually seem to care about solving this, and they're doing a good job.

Good to know.

$7.5B is chicken feed if the megacorps all chipped in, just needs the will and a social and environment conscious to do so and they get a tiny bit of gratitude back from the world, hell they all need some good PR!

Saying that most of what they have recovered is large chunks does not indicate that the plastic has not broken down into microplastics. It just means they are only recovering large chunks, and anything breaking down has already gone into the food chain and swum away.

The only thing standing between us and clean oceans is money. But there are far too many people out there who would rather have the money than the clean oceans.