While I was quaking under my bed, hiding from plagues and politics, some other people were busy doing productive work out in the deep blue ocean.
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch (GPGP) spans waters from the West Coast of North America to Japan. There are other garbage patches in the world, but the GPGP is the largest. It covers an estimated surface area of 1.6million square kilometers, an area twice the size of Texas or three times the size of France. An estimated 87,000 European tonnes (96,000US tons) of plastic inhabit the patch. This trash originates on land and travels to the ocean by way of rivers flowing all across the planet. It is estimated that 1.15 to 2.41 million tonnes (1.2 to 2.7 million US tons) of plastic are entering the ocean each year in this manner.
One nonprofit organization, based in the Netherlands and called the Ocean Cleanup, has developed technology to rid the oceans of this plastic debris. Their primary means of addressing this issue is through the use of a solar powered and autonomous machine that funnels river trash into a collecting bin. Because trash is not evenly spread out over the width of a river, but tends to collect in specific area(s) of a river. depending on it’s flow characteristics, Ocean Cleanup places the trash collecting machine where it will be most efficient and obstruct traffic the least. Taking these factors into consideration, this technology is feasible to use even on heavily traveled rivers. The Ocean Cleanup estimates that 80% of ocean trash is contributed by 1000 rivers, located all over the world. The group plans to install these devises on all of these particular rivers over the next few years.
Cleanup is also being started started in the GPGP itself, and will eventually move around to the other patches across the globe. A recent expedition in the Pacific by Ocean Cleanup involved a seven-week trip on a vessel equipped with a mobile version of this technology. Over 100,000 pounds of garbage was collected and returned to shore to be recycled.
It's wonderful to see some progress in removing the garbage and hopefully we will see more. Ten years from now, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch may be known as “The Incredible Shrinking Garbage Patch.”