Great Pacific Garbage Patch

[phosphide]

[Spider]

"A couple million"? That's not even a drop in the bucket in the sort of remediation costs involved. And it's not a "pile", it's mostly particulate mass sloshing around at different levels depending on weather and current. Its actually a very diffuse soup of tiny bits of ground up plastic. Years ago when I had time for fun I crewed on a relative's boat between Hilo and Homer, and sailing through the Pacific High we made a game of sitting there waiting to see an old fishing float or random plastic container or something drift by. Hours can go by without seeing anything at all but empty water...but if you drag a fine net through it, you can filter out thousands of little bits.

It would be cheaper to build a colony on Mars complete with a Starbucks, a microbrewery, and a strip club than to clean that up. I guess you'd have to drag fine nets through it with giant trawlers over and over for a century or so until you'd filtered millions of tons of it out and disposed of it somehow....oh wait nevermind we're probably adding to it faster than it could be removed. The answer is in controlling plastic getting washed out from the mainland. And of course, getting China (and the rest of Asia) on board. They don't give a shit. And it's mostly their mess. They do whatever the hell they want with the Pacific and there are no evil regulations stopping them. Just pure slash and burn capitalism out there. Lawlessness.

[The Comrade]

it's really not that hard or expensive to clean up. we just lack the will to.

[Spider]

No. That's f**k wrong. It's expensive. We're talking about filtering the Pacific Gyre. A huge, remote location with zero infrastructure where everything and everyone would have to be shipped across vast distances at enormous cost. To say nothing of the actual disposal of the crap that gets pulled out.

Just cleaning up a sunken yacht in a harbor is stupendously expensive, and that is basically one big piece that's near land.

The trouble is that the news says something sensationalist about a garbage island the size of Texas, or twice as big or whatever, and so that's what people imagine. They think it's a big floating mess that can just be gathered up. But it's not remotely true, and these same people have no concept of what it takes to do things at sea. That's just the size and location of the gyre changing with weather and current. That there is a bunch of crap mixed into it floating about doesn't change the nature of the gyre.

They post pictures like this to depict it:


(Obviously, that boat couldn't make it to the gyre. To say nothing of the coastline in the background.)

Or this:

(Japanese tsunami debrid, actually)

...though I'd be interested to find out how much of it is actually is tsunami debris that's simply not broken down into microplastic yet.

It actually looks like this:


Lots of plastic there. But diffused into such a gigantic volume of water that it's hard to even comprehend it.

[John Galt]

Yeah it's gonna take a lot to do it. Some interesting techniques being employed though I've seen

Roughly half of the plastic is from fishing gear. Regulating fishing in the ocean is something we, as a planet, really need to address

[phosphide]

That's still a shitload of trash.

[JDHURF]

[Spider]

[Saz]

Hmm unfortunately I have to agree with Spider. It will take 1bn+ for government to even "study" this issue and figure out a course of action, actual clean up will be tens of billions of dollars and the shit will be back in a decade or something. I don't think people have any sense of scale with regard to the oceans. Even when comparing to land people don't account for DEPTH. Even 100kg per square kilometer is basically nothing if you were actually out there staring at 1sq/km of ocean.

In the Philippines along the coast they had huge nets that were like floating crab traps or something. trash floats in but cant float out. They would dump a bunch of these either right in a harbor or for tourist beaching a bit of a ways off shore. Some guy in a small tug boat would retrieve the nets one at a time for disposal on land. Seemed to work well but then again the ocean was still full of trash so the scale is overwhelming.

[The Comrade]