The Great Pacific Garbage Patch Is Now A Quarter Of A Million Pounds Lighter With The Cleanup Efforts

Hakai Magazine

Have you ever wondered where the garbage thrown in oceans go? The tides carry them to far-off places and most end up in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (or what they call GPGP). What exactly is this and are efforts being made to clean up the area?

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is also known as the Pacific trash vortex. This is where the collection of marine debris ends up. The circular motion of the gyre draws all the debris in and creates a very stable, yet dirty center.

The accumulation has threatened the lives of the living things around it. Thus, people have been searching for ways to clean it up ever since its discovery. Just the previous year, a very smart young man named Boyan Slat announced that “The Great Pacific Garbage Patch can now be cleaned.” He came up with a prototype cleaning system and this proved to work extremely well.

Since the prototype had been deployed last August 2021, System 02 (or “Jenny”) had become famous to the world. That’s because Jenny had managed to collect a total of 220,000 pounds (101,353 kg) of plastic. It took more than 45 extractions to do so and its main task was to sweep an area of the ocean that’s over 3,000 square kilometers. This is as big as Luxembourg or Rhode Island, which is quite a feat on its own.


“Added to the 7,173 kg of plastic captured by our previous prototype systems, The Ocean Cleanup has now collected 108,526 kg of plastic from the “GPGP”—more than the combined weight of two and a half Boeing 737-800s, or the dry weight of a space shuttle,” Slat had mentioned.

According to a 2018 study that had been organized by The Ocean Cleanup to map the GPGP, the total amount of accumulated plastic is said to be a whopping 79,000,000 kg, or 100,000,000 kg if the exterior areas are covered in the count.

“Thus, if we repeat this 100,000 kg haul 1,000 times—the Great Pacific Garbage Patch will be gone”.

While the idea that 100,000 kilograms were extracted in just a little over the years, it’s still a step forward. However, this will also imply that they may need a total of 1,000 years to completely clean up the area. Not to fret because Slat has come up with even better ideas that will cut the time significantly.


“System 03, which is expected to capture plastic at a rate potentially 10 times higher than System 002 through a combination of increased size, improved efficiency, and increased uptime, will be starting soon,” Slat shared.

This means that System 03 will go bigger. This means that they will take out the requirement for support vessels. This, in turn, will cut the cost of each ton of plastic removed. That’s because these support vessels have a high input cost. In fact, most of the budget have gone to this.

The capture area for GPGP is around two miles. While some people might worry about the use of the net, they have designed it in a way that the fish capture or the other marine life in the area will still be less than a quarter of a percentage point of the overall haul that it will make.

Slat has been receiving a lot of praise for his humanitarian efforts. His brilliant ideas seem to be the answer to the conundrum. Still, he does come across detractors as well. To assuage the minds of doubters and naysayers, he had created an Instagram post. His goal was to broaden his audience’s understanding and make them realize just critical the work is. What he’s doing is making people aware of the future of the oceans with this device.

 

 

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