> 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
Okay so the article’s prime version costs $2/lb of trash removal.
Let’s look at the next paragraph to see how the non-profit they’re comparing against did:
> 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.
Okay, so the competitor is $0.6/lb. I mean that sounds great. The whole article is like a price comparison against a competitor where they say “the other guys are more efficient, cheaper and we cost 3 times as much”.
They may not have solved the problem, but at least they are doing something about it. In my opinion, that's better than doing nothing at all. I've seen firsthand how their solutions have been implemented and have had a positive impact on the environment. How often do we hear promises from NGOs or government entities claiming they will solve humanitarian issues such as housing shortages or hunger, only to fail miserably while spending billions of dollars in the process? Meanwhile, others grow rich from government tenders and contracts at the expense of the unfortunate beneficiaries.
The point of the article is that this intervention is actively harmful for exactly the same reasons raised by experts a long time ago.
> 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.
> distract from real unsexy solutions like grab the plastic in rivers BEFORE they make it to 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
See, you've just shown how you have fallen for the very trap that is being discussed: you think garbage collection is the solution. Plastic recycling was never a valid solution to the problem of plastic trash in the environment.
Recycling was a non-solution the oil and plastics industries used to deflect criticism of their products. They knew would never be feasible because the polymer is no longer in a state that is suitable for re-use once it's been heated and formed, and that degradation gets even worse as it ages, is exposed to UV, etc. Anything made with it will be inferior. Weaker, not as dense, and so on.
They also knew that it would be impossible for any significant amount of plastic to be recycled, even if it was feasible to re-use it.
It also shifted the onus from the producers of a wildly harmful material to the consumers. "It's those litterbugs!"
The auto industry managed to shift public perception from "cars are insanely dangerous products" to "idiot leeches of society are throwing themselves in front of car drivers who are upstanding people who contribute to society!" Seriously - look at the cartoons from the early auto industry era. The "jaywalker" is portrayed as slovenly, poor, and stupid. The car owner is portrayed as well dressed, intelligent...
The plastics industry has turned things from "our products never, ever go away. They break down into tinier and tinier pieces, and the particles are so prolific that there literally isn't a single place on earth not contaminated by them, not a single creature that hasn't ingested them, and it's now in our brains"...
...to "silly irresponsible people are not responsibly disposing of their plastics so they can be recycled by us responsible plastic producers! Look, we sponsor beach trash cleanup groups! Look at this picture of our smiling employees spending a day in safety vests helping collect plastic from a couple hundred square feet of beach!"
Think about that. Plastic is in your brain. That's how thoroughly contaminated the entire planet and ecosystem is. And it's because the plastic and oil industry deflected "plastics are bad" with non-solutions and claims about recycling and pictures of neonatal babies inside plastic incubators with plastic tubes and plastic IV bags. Do YOU want to have that preemie die because the evil hippies want to take away your plastic, mnau?
My read of the article is that they’ve also pivoted to the methods experts suggest as well. The article actually phrases that in a negative way weirdly. I agree with the original comment, at least they’re trying and iterating. You get conflicting feedback from experts in all cases. At some point you have to commit and try.
Alternatively, creating incentives for plastics to never be deposited in rivers to begin with...
"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."
The "10 rivers carry 93%" figure quoted above is Schmidt et al. 2017 (Env. Sci. & Tech.). The field has revised it hard since: Meijer et al., Science Advances 2021 (open access, doi:10.1126/sciadv.aaz5803) finds 1,656 rivers account for 80% of global emissions (0.8-2.7 Mt/yr), not 10. Small rivers dominate: 830 rivers under 10 m3/s carry 30% of emissions, while the 33 largest rivers account for ~3%. Worth noting the lead author is at The Ocean Cleanup, so the revision came from inside the project itself.
The difference is you can start processing plastic in the middle of the ocean NOW with very little oversight. Capturing river plastic requires collaboration of local authorities and people. This turns a purely technical solution into a human solution which is messy and slow and different everywhere. Even though it's the better thing to do to have a chance at stopping the damage.
How about regulate plastic so it doesn't end up in the river in the first place?
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.
There are many countries involved, who may be are unable or unwilling to pass or enforce the kinds of necessary laws. And people who donate want to see outcomes like "removed X tons of garbage", not "continued to lobby government to pass law".
Also wild guess consumers in your country aren’t dumping their trash in the river because you have a function garbage system. It is mainly an issue with poor people in developing countries with no access (or cost prohibitive access) to garbage collection. Not sure if taxing the very poorest on earth is great.
> 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.
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.
> 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 system change nonsense is why no progress has been made on climate change for the past 2 decades.
Could have been well on the way either way solar and wind if a pile of other issues weren’t bundled into the conversation.
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.
Spot on. Another thing these experts fail to mention is that a lot of the data on the Pacific Garbage patch actually comes from the Ocean Cleanup, since, you know, they actually went out there to look.
I'm curious, what have firsthand experience have you seen of solutions implemented by The Ocean Cleanup?
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.
>> They may not have solved the problem, but at least they are doing something about it. In my opinion, that's better than doing nothing at all.
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.)"
> 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
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?
> They may not have solved the problem, but at least they are doing something about it. In my opinion, that's better than doing nothing at all.
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.
On a much smaller scale, a pool of water recently required renovation with a bill of $16 million. Failed miserably. I think it’s a great example of your point nonetheless.
The title of the article is kind of technically correct but still misleading.
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.
Read again? Negative is the enemy of good, and this project was a net negative.
As PR it went well, if you didn't examine it too closely. It was a misnomer from the start - it was 'harbor cleanup' or 'river cleanup' really. Where the big obvious plastic objects are. I don't believe they proposed any method for actually cleaning up the 'garbage patch' which consists of pepper-sized particles of plastic that requires a sieve to see. And which has been colonized by many marine creatures, so 'cleaning it up' would have the side effect of mass sterilization.
Issues are hard. PR is easy, especially if you hand-wave over the hard stuff.
I'm confused about the idea that the project was a net negative. Based on what? River cleanups are happening that weren't happening before. That seems relatively positive.
Is the negative that they spent too much money on the trawling that didn't work?
I'm not arrogant enough to think I know more about this than an expert who's devoted their life to ocean research, but the article itself comes across as a list of grievances against the Ocean Cleanup project rather than an objective review - mostly due to emotionally charged language like "apparently killing enormous numbers of marine organisms" and "out there spewing diesel fumes from a ship that cost $100,000 a day"
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.
They switched focus to collecting plastic at river mouths, as the article mentions near the end, around 2019. That is seven years ago. That strategy does not harm sea life and has been very successful collecting 40 million kilos of plastic so far.
Their only activity in the ocean is in the 'great pacific garbage patch' - what % of that surface dwelling sealife lives in this exact spot? The article doesn't actually go into the environmental impact.
"The river interceptor design was clearly based on existing solutions" like Mr. Trash Wheel, Dr. Richards says. "Rather than work with the organizations who had successfully been removing trash from rivers for years, they ‘reinvented’ a similar design, at a much higher cost, and claimed to be innovators."
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.
Reminds me of the endless "12 year old wins $25k young innovator award for inventing a solar panel that can go on the roof of an EV to charge while you drive!" type proclamations
> That criticism and feedback haven’t dissuaded The Ocean Cleanup
[One paragraph later]
> the team pivoted in 2019 toward a new model that was first suggested by critics and skeptics as an alternative in 2015.
So.... It did dissuade them away from their original vision and towards something suggested by critics and experts.
I hate it when people cite someone changing their mind about something as a gotcha or a fault. So they switched towards a better direction seven years ago! But the rest of the article is still about how terrible the old idea was, and how it proves that people have an "only I can fix it mentality," when it actually proves the exact opposite!
> their picture shows HUNDREDS of floating animals trapped with the plastic.
I'm curious to know how many animals die from the plastic. This article seems to think that any deaths caused by cleanup are reason to stop. Just like people who point to dead birds as reasons to ban wind turbines, despite far more wildlife being at risk from a warming planet.
It's quite possible that ocean cleanup efforts do more damage, I don't know, but the article doesn't even try to grapple with quantifying it. It's just a fear-mongering screed.
Honestly the title of this article is ridiculous. A global problem like plastic pollution, decades in the making, won't be solved by a single organization, especially an NGO, in only 13 years.
I still applaud the word TOC is doing and find it very worthwhile. But let's just be reasonable with our expectations.
We need to tax non-degradable plastics for this externality. Also, I highly doubt this is from run-off of plastics carried to the sea. It's far more likely it's just being dumped. Probably much of it from people that thought it was getting recycled.
We have plastic that lasts a few years instead of hundreds. The pollution problem slowly solves itself if we just put in a bit of effort to ban the cheapest of the cheap plastics. The technology is here, we're just refusing to do anything.
What is then the impact of dissolving plastics in a few years? Can't believe it's a zero impact scenario. We can't still figure out what microplastics do to our health. As usual the best solution is the simplest: prevent plastics to ever reach the ocean. As simple as that and that doesn't costs much
Once plastic is in the middle of the ocean, it's game over. Much better to invest in reducing plastic use in the first place all those one-time-use plastics and invest in developing and improving recycling of the plastic.
Germany, for example, has facilities that can automatically sort plastic both by type and color, which is quite impressive.
> 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.
The plastic devouring bacteria breeding program is going very well. Typing this on a phone that dissolves as we speak. As if a million million-sided dice are thrown in unison, always landing on the six-up - a thousand times in a row to get through a labyrinth.
Yeah it'll be great when plastic starts to rot like wood. Thank god we haven't spent the last 60 years using plastic as a water proof electrical insulator.
This showed the same dynamics as most carbon-capture boondoggles. They can never work, and receive funding _because_ they distract from the core problems.
After living in Vietnam / Cambodia / Laos for 4 years, I came to the conclusion that there is no hope to the problem.
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.
Ah right, so it would be far better if the Ocean Cleanup did not exist, technology were to not have been tested for cleaning up ocean plastic, and people would not have known about plastic in the ocean via the Ocean Cleanup's social media?
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.
Ocean Cleanup always felt scammy to me. Just a feeling. The videos they released of the nets dropping tons of plastic trash onto the deck of a ship just seemed off. All of the plastic looked brand new. And knowing that the "great garbage patch" is really just a bunch of microplastics also screamed fake to me.
Ocean Cleanup is still hard at it cleaning major plastic emissions sources worldwide. I'm surprised they're still going and that they've managed to scale into different modalities of mass cleaning. Sure, it's not cleaning the world or placing consumer deposit on all plastic, but they're doing significant good.
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).
I know it's fashionable to blame capitalism for everything which is wrong with the world but it's the people and governments who don't care about the pollution and think that's it's fine to throw garbage on the ground or in the river instead of disposing it properly. The Soviet Union did a fair amount of damage to the environment, despite not being a capitalist country.
it wasn't that long ago that most daily use goods were sold in reusable glass bottles, jars, paper bags. Clothes, shoes, appliances, furniture was durable, lasting multiple years, sometimes even passed on between generations. Then, late stage capitalism decided to optimize the hell out of everything, told us that glass is too heavy for economic distribution of goods, paper not hygienic enough and that we need internet enabled toasters. We now end up drowning in plastics, forced to replace cars, heavy appliances every 2 years but most of all are seeking weird solutions and feel good stories to solve this, well in line with the principle of the orphan crushing machine.
I am very happy that the many glass shards and the inevitable cuts have been replaced by essentially zero plastic trash in streets/forests/seas in my country and all other civilized countries.
The problem is not Europe (outside of gypsy camps and illegal immigrant camps). It is mostly some parts of Asia (and it would likely also be some parts of Africa if they could afford as much plastic).
Sometimes is crazy how deluded people can be on all this safe the planet initiatives... All you have to do to figure out whos contributing the most with the whole plastic in the sea is go a beach and see what plastic do you see... maybe in a few hours walk you collect about 2 shopping bags of coke bottles, the other 2 tons you cant carry is all fishing industry discarded gear.
Cleaning the ocean, yeah right... tackle the fishing industry first.
> 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
Okay so the article’s prime version costs $2/lb of trash removal.
Let’s look at the next paragraph to see how the non-profit they’re comparing against did:
> 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.
Okay, so the competitor is $0.6/lb. I mean that sounds great. The whole article is like a price comparison against a competitor where they say “the other guys are more efficient, cheaper and we cost 3 times as much”.
They may not have solved the problem, but at least they are doing something about it. In my opinion, that's better than doing nothing at all. I've seen firsthand how their solutions have been implemented and have had a positive impact on the environment. How often do we hear promises from NGOs or government entities claiming they will solve humanitarian issues such as housing shortages or hunger, only to fail miserably while spending billions of dollars in the process? Meanwhile, others grow rich from government tenders and contracts at the expense of the unfortunate beneficiaries.
The point of the article is that this intervention is actively harmful for exactly the same reasons raised by experts a long time ago.
> 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.
> distract from real unsexy solutions like grab the plastic in rivers BEFORE they make it to 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
> having proper garbage collection would be best
See, you've just shown how you have fallen for the very trap that is being discussed: you think garbage collection is the solution. Plastic recycling was never a valid solution to the problem of plastic trash in the environment.
Recycling was a non-solution the oil and plastics industries used to deflect criticism of their products. They knew would never be feasible because the polymer is no longer in a state that is suitable for re-use once it's been heated and formed, and that degradation gets even worse as it ages, is exposed to UV, etc. Anything made with it will be inferior. Weaker, not as dense, and so on.
They also knew that it would be impossible for any significant amount of plastic to be recycled, even if it was feasible to re-use it.
It also shifted the onus from the producers of a wildly harmful material to the consumers. "It's those litterbugs!"
The auto industry managed to shift public perception from "cars are insanely dangerous products" to "idiot leeches of society are throwing themselves in front of car drivers who are upstanding people who contribute to society!" Seriously - look at the cartoons from the early auto industry era. The "jaywalker" is portrayed as slovenly, poor, and stupid. The car owner is portrayed as well dressed, intelligent...
The plastics industry has turned things from "our products never, ever go away. They break down into tinier and tinier pieces, and the particles are so prolific that there literally isn't a single place on earth not contaminated by them, not a single creature that hasn't ingested them, and it's now in our brains"...
...to "silly irresponsible people are not responsibly disposing of their plastics so they can be recycled by us responsible plastic producers! Look, we sponsor beach trash cleanup groups! Look at this picture of our smiling employees spending a day in safety vests helping collect plastic from a couple hundred square feet of beach!"
Think about that. Plastic is in your brain. That's how thoroughly contaminated the entire planet and ecosystem is. And it's because the plastic and oil industry deflected "plastics are bad" with non-solutions and claims about recycling and pictures of neonatal babies inside plastic incubators with plastic tubes and plastic IV bags. Do YOU want to have that preemie die because the evil hippies want to take away your plastic, mnau?
When I was in school we were taught the 3 R's: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.
I haven't heard about Reduce and Reuse since.
> It also shifted the onus from the producers of a wildly harmful material to the consumers. "It's those litterbugs!"
It mostly is those litterbugs in Asia.
My read of the article is that they’ve also pivoted to the methods experts suggest as well. The article actually phrases that in a negative way weirdly. I agree with the original comment, at least they’re trying and iterating. You get conflicting feedback from experts in all cases. At some point you have to commit and try.
Alternatively, creating incentives for plastics to never be deposited in rivers to begin with...
"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...
The "10 rivers carry 93%" figure quoted above is Schmidt et al. 2017 (Env. Sci. & Tech.). The field has revised it hard since: Meijer et al., Science Advances 2021 (open access, doi:10.1126/sciadv.aaz5803) finds 1,656 rivers account for 80% of global emissions (0.8-2.7 Mt/yr), not 10. Small rivers dominate: 830 rivers under 10 m3/s carry 30% of emissions, while the 33 largest rivers account for ~3%. Worth noting the lead author is at The Ocean Cleanup, so the revision came from inside the project itself.
The difference is you can start processing plastic in the middle of the ocean NOW with very little oversight. Capturing river plastic requires collaboration of local authorities and people. This turns a purely technical solution into a human solution which is messy and slow and different everywhere. Even though it's the better thing to do to have a chance at stopping the damage.
How about regulate plastic so it doesn't end up in the river in the first place?
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.
There are many countries involved, who may be are unable or unwilling to pass or enforce the kinds of necessary laws. And people who donate want to see outcomes like "removed X tons of garbage", not "continued to lobby government to pass law".
Regulate it how? They tried to put an extra tax on plastic in my country and guess what consumers will just pay it.
Also wild guess consumers in your country aren’t dumping their trash in the river because you have a function garbage system. It is mainly an issue with poor people in developing countries with no access (or cost prohibitive access) to garbage collection. Not sure if taxing the very poorest on earth is great.
> 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.
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.
Yes they might catch a lot of animals, but I didn't read how harmfull this really is.
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.
What evidence is there that people would start funding river clean up if they stopped funding in-ocean initiatives?
Well, when I talk about fixing the core issues with JavaScript, these days people say "why bother, just paper it over at the TS layer..."
> 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 system change nonsense is why no progress has been made on climate change for the past 2 decades.
Could have been well on the way either way solar and wind if a pile of other issues weren’t bundled into the conversation.
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.
Perfect is the enemy of good.
I think the Ocean Cleanup has been one of the most effective (non- political/commercial) PR campaigns of the last decade.
Spot on. Another thing these experts fail to mention is that a lot of the data on the Pacific Garbage patch actually comes from the Ocean Cleanup, since, you know, they actually went out there to look.
I'm curious, what have firsthand experience have you seen of solutions implemented by The Ocean Cleanup?
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.
>> They may not have solved the problem, but at least they are doing something about it. In my opinion, that's better than doing nothing at all.
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.)"
> 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
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?
> They may not have solved the problem, but at least they are doing something about it. In my opinion, that's better than doing nothing at all.
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.
On a much smaller scale, a pool of water recently required renovation with a bill of $16 million. Failed miserably. I think it’s a great example of your point nonetheless.
NGOs don't "fail miserably" - their actual goal is laundering tax money, and they very much do succeed!
The title of the article is kind of technically correct but still misleading.
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.
Read again? Negative is the enemy of good, and this project was a net negative. As PR it went well, if you didn't examine it too closely. It was a misnomer from the start - it was 'harbor cleanup' or 'river cleanup' really. Where the big obvious plastic objects are. I don't believe they proposed any method for actually cleaning up the 'garbage patch' which consists of pepper-sized particles of plastic that requires a sieve to see. And which has been colonized by many marine creatures, so 'cleaning it up' would have the side effect of mass sterilization.
Issues are hard. PR is easy, especially if you hand-wave over the hard stuff.
I'm confused about the idea that the project was a net negative. Based on what? River cleanups are happening that weren't happening before. That seems relatively positive.
Is the negative that they spent too much money on the trawling that didn't work?
They're still doing ocean cleanup, too. Getting the fishing equipment out of the water is a huge improvement.
Agreed
I'm not arrogant enough to think I know more about this than an expert who's devoted their life to ocean research, but the article itself comes across as a list of grievances against the Ocean Cleanup project rather than an objective review - mostly due to emotionally charged language like "apparently killing enormous numbers of marine organisms" and "out there spewing diesel fumes from a ship that cost $100,000 a day"
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.
Strangely negative piece.
They switched focus to collecting plastic at river mouths, as the article mentions near the end, around 2019. That is seven years ago. That strategy does not harm sea life and has been very successful collecting 40 million kilos of plastic so far.
Their only activity in the ocean is in the 'great pacific garbage patch' - what % of that surface dwelling sealife lives in this exact spot? The article doesn't actually go into the environmental impact.
"The river interceptor design was clearly based on existing solutions" like Mr. Trash Wheel, Dr. Richards says. "Rather than work with the organizations who had successfully been removing trash from rivers for years, they ‘reinvented’ a similar design, at a much higher cost, and claimed to be innovators."
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.
Reminds me of the endless "12 year old wins $25k young innovator award for inventing a solar panel that can go on the roof of an EV to charge while you drive!" type proclamations
And yet we all ended up sucking our beverages out of glue-lined paper straws for a hot minute. :\
And extra extra credit for NGOs (and startups) that openly advertise "competitors".
> That criticism and feedback haven’t dissuaded The Ocean Cleanup
[One paragraph later]
> the team pivoted in 2019 toward a new model that was first suggested by critics and skeptics as an alternative in 2015.
So.... It did dissuade them away from their original vision and towards something suggested by critics and experts.
I hate it when people cite someone changing their mind about something as a gotcha or a fault. So they switched towards a better direction seven years ago! But the rest of the article is still about how terrible the old idea was, and how it proves that people have an "only I can fix it mentality," when it actually proves the exact opposite!
> their picture shows HUNDREDS of floating animals trapped with the plastic.
I'm curious to know how many animals die from the plastic. This article seems to think that any deaths caused by cleanup are reason to stop. Just like people who point to dead birds as reasons to ban wind turbines, despite far more wildlife being at risk from a warming planet.
It's quite possible that ocean cleanup efforts do more damage, I don't know, but the article doesn't even try to grapple with quantifying it. It's just a fear-mongering screed.
Honestly the title of this article is ridiculous. A global problem like plastic pollution, decades in the making, won't be solved by a single organization, especially an NGO, in only 13 years.
I still applaud the word TOC is doing and find it very worthwhile. But let's just be reasonable with our expectations.
We need to tax non-degradable plastics for this externality. Also, I highly doubt this is from run-off of plastics carried to the sea. It's far more likely it's just being dumped. Probably much of it from people that thought it was getting recycled.
We have plastic that lasts a few years instead of hundreds. The pollution problem slowly solves itself if we just put in a bit of effort to ban the cheapest of the cheap plastics. The technology is here, we're just refusing to do anything.
What is then the impact of dissolving plastics in a few years? Can't believe it's a zero impact scenario. We can't still figure out what microplastics do to our health. As usual the best solution is the simplest: prevent plastics to ever reach the ocean. As simple as that and that doesn't costs much
Once plastic is in the middle of the ocean, it's game over. Much better to invest in reducing plastic use in the first place all those one-time-use plastics and invest in developing and improving recycling of the plastic.
Germany, for example, has facilities that can automatically sort plastic both by type and color, which is quite impressive.
> 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.
Sympathetic to other strategies but that writeup is wholly unconvincing. It comes across as astroturf.
The plastic devouring bacteria breeding program is going very well. Typing this on a phone that dissolves as we speak. As if a million million-sided dice are thrown in unison, always landing on the six-up - a thousand times in a row to get through a labyrinth.
Yeah it'll be great when plastic starts to rot like wood. Thank god we haven't spent the last 60 years using plastic as a water proof electrical insulator.
Now I'm imagining an eco-terrorist that develops a plastic eating fungus as ubiquitous and hardy as yeast and releases it into the world.
This showed the same dynamics as most carbon-capture boondoggles. They can never work, and receive funding _because_ they distract from the core problems.
After living in Vietnam / Cambodia / Laos for 4 years, I came to the conclusion that there is no hope to the problem.
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.
Sources of ocean plastic https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Global-emissions-of-plas...
Curiously maps to the places where they are doing river cleanup, who would have figured!? https://theoceancleanup.com/rivers/
> The Ocean Cleanup didn’t work, for the reasons experts said it wouldn’t. What can we learn from this?
Listen to experts. At least they recognize the "I told you so".
Ah right, so it would be far better if the Ocean Cleanup did not exist, technology were to not have been tested for cleaning up ocean plastic, and people would not have known about plastic in the ocean via the Ocean Cleanup's social media?
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?
Ocean Cleanup always felt scammy to me. Just a feeling. The videos they released of the nets dropping tons of plastic trash onto the deck of a ship just seemed off. All of the plastic looked brand new. And knowing that the "great garbage patch" is really just a bunch of microplastics also screamed fake to me.
Ocean Cleanup is still hard at it cleaning major plastic emissions sources worldwide. I'm surprised they're still going and that they've managed to scale into different modalities of mass cleaning. Sure, it's not cleaning the world or placing consumer deposit on all plastic, but they're doing significant good.
It’s capitalism. The market has determined that plastic in the ocean is the most efficient way to produce goods and services.
everybody knows that bankers in manhattan throws their plastic bottle into the hudson from their skyscrapers
It's also chemistry.
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).
I know it's fashionable to blame capitalism for everything which is wrong with the world but it's the people and governments who don't care about the pollution and think that's it's fine to throw garbage on the ground or in the river instead of disposing it properly. The Soviet Union did a fair amount of damage to the environment, despite not being a capitalist country.
Update: a small grammar fix.
Soviet Union did a fair amount of damage to the environment being a capitalist country.
it's largely because it's being dumped or littered instead of being disposed in a garbage can.
it wasn't that long ago that most daily use goods were sold in reusable glass bottles, jars, paper bags. Clothes, shoes, appliances, furniture was durable, lasting multiple years, sometimes even passed on between generations. Then, late stage capitalism decided to optimize the hell out of everything, told us that glass is too heavy for economic distribution of goods, paper not hygienic enough and that we need internet enabled toasters. We now end up drowning in plastics, forced to replace cars, heavy appliances every 2 years but most of all are seeking weird solutions and feel good stories to solve this, well in line with the principle of the orphan crushing machine.
I am very happy that the many glass shards and the inevitable cuts have been replaced by essentially zero plastic trash in streets/forests/seas in my country and all other civilized countries.
The problem is not Europe (outside of gypsy camps and illegal immigrant camps). It is mostly some parts of Asia (and it would likely also be some parts of Africa if they could afford as much plastic).
Sometimes is crazy how deluded people can be on all this safe the planet initiatives... All you have to do to figure out whos contributing the most with the whole plastic in the sea is go a beach and see what plastic do you see... maybe in a few hours walk you collect about 2 shopping bags of coke bottles, the other 2 tons you cant carry is all fishing industry discarded gear.
Cleaning the ocean, yeah right... tackle the fishing industry first.