Cleanup Group Says It's on Track to Eliminate the Great Pacific Garbage Patch
Cleanup Group Says It's on Track to Eliminate the Great Pacific Garbage Patch
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/36161054
this might be the only good environmental news i've read since we got rid of cfcs
Use Ecosia.com for web searches, they plant trees.
Ecosia.org is what it redirects to, but yeah I've been using them for a couple of years now and it is nice to see some positive work being done!
This is very good news! Please don't forget that even if the great pacific garbage patch doesn't exist, that doesn't mean that the ocean is clean. There are still lots of garbage in the ocean!
However everybody needs to work where the problem originates.
There's only four left to clean after this one.
In 2014, there were five areas across all the oceans where the majority of plastic concentrated. Researchers collected a total of 3070 samples across the world to identify hot spots of surface level plastic pollution. The pattern of distribution closely mirrored models of oceanic currents with the North Pacific Gyre, or Great Pacific Garbage Patch, being the highest density of plastic accumulation. The other four garbage patches include the North Atlantic garbage patch between the North America and Africa, the South Atlantic garbage patch located between eastern South America and the tip of Africa, the South Pacific garbage patch located west of South America, and the Indian Ocean garbage patch found east of South Africa.
Aight but one of them is gonna take another decade to clear.
Finally someone attempts to remove the UK ❤️
They're going to be so embarrassed when they realize the garbage patch isn't even in the Pacific.
It was moved following brexit
angry bri'ish noises
tutting intensifies
I still got microplastics in my balls.
Microplastics are stored in the balls
They can take away our Pacific garbage patch, but they can never take our ball micro plastics!
A thin film of plastic is all that protects our block and tackle from the 5g woke mind virus. Why else do you think we call it our "Junk"?
And give up free 5g? Are you insane?
This comment is a pretty solid example of the normal UpliftingNews comments.
Seems easier picking up trash by hand than taxing the rich for the project
So far, the nonprofit claims it has fished out a million pounds of trash from the patch, a mere 0.5 percent of its total. But within a decade, it says, it could ramp up its operations to get rid of it in its entirety.
Next year, the company will focus its efforts on establishing a "hotspot" map of areas in the ocean with "intense plastic accumulation."
While $7.5 billion may sound like a lot, it's less than one month's worth of Apple's profits last year, or a sixth of the bonus Tesla shareholders awarded to CEO Elon Musk.
or a sixth of the bonus Tesla shareholders awarded to CEO Elon Musk.
Disgusting. He tanked Tesla, and he gets a bonus?
To give him "motivation" to keep innovating and bring us to mars, supposedly. God there's no limit to the sheer stupidity of muskrat fanboys.
That's not possible unless you ban fishing nets
True, but let's not the baby out with the bathwater.
98% or 90% or even a verifiable 50% reduction is insanely amazing news
So far, the nonprofit claims it has fished out a million pounds of trash from the patch, a mere 0.5 percent of its total. But within a decade, it says, it could ramp up its operations to get rid of it in its entirety.
:-/
They're asking for $75B for the full project and currently relying on start up capital with a tiny fraction of that. Apple's "committed" $7.5B tentative to Ocean Cleanup Project raising the rest on short notice.
This isn't "on track". It's a pilot project that's in the middle of a Series B funding round.
Also - most critically - it's not clear in the article what they're doing with the waste they recover. Simply moving it around doesn't eliminate the garbage. And the project does not appear to include a budget for recycling or otherwise repurposing what they recover.
Isn't the majority of plastic in the ocean caused by fishing?
This article is just over a year old...
Thank you for saying something! Can't believe I didn't check myself.
It also lead to me finding this: https://theoceancleanup.com/dashboard/
If I understand correctly, system 3 is the one most relevant to the great garbage patch. It's currently at port, and has been for nearly a year. Not sure what to make of this.
I wasn't even paying attention, my bad. I just saw it in my feed a decided to crosspost it here.
And the article says "we can totally do this! All need is loads of money! Please donate!"
Been following them for years. They do great work, but often seem a little overly optimistic in their messaging. What they are doing is a hard challenge and they seem to be slowly getting better and better. I wonder if they also are lacking a bit in funding to be able to efficiently move forward.
They’re mostly thinking 10 years, but:
Better yet, if the nonprofit's latest technological ideas come to fruition, Slat suggests we could even clear the patch in just five years at a cost of just $4 billion.
Ultimately though it comes down to funding, and I’m not sure this is the administration with the stomach to fund these types of projects.
Once it's cleaned up we should replace all the garbage with cum, so the fish can eat the cum.
What's going to stop the polluters doing it again?
And sue for costs, from the manufacturers, if plastic is too expensive, they'll stop using it, if they had to pay the environmental costs, it would become too expensive.
They are. Now.
Bio degradable plastics
I love this, it's great, but it doesn't address the root cause unfortunately
i dont know why you would say this unless youre just replying to headlines.. most of the plastic comes from just a handfull of rivers and they're catching the plastic at the source with their river collection programs (lots of interesting solutions they're using including bubble curtains)
the patch is continually being replenished, so....
So? Then you just gotta do a cleanup run every month or so to keep it clean. Its not about getting it to zero, its about minimizing it.
There’s other projects that also tackle that
They thought of that, too. There are a finite number of rivers responsible for bringing the vast majority of trash into the ocean
And the fishermen in the ocean?
i can't seem to find a futurism on lemmy. does it exist?
I found a few futurology comms, not sure if that's the same thing as futurism.
Some comms also have different names but when I search futurism or futurology they are in the results so perhaps the comm description is included in the results.
Also I don't know if the method of searching I'm using in Voyager is limited to the comms that users on the instance my account is on are subscribed to.
!futurology_pocasts@futurology.today
it's not on lemmy, it's an external link
I think they were looking for a sub for them
Sorry, this isn't news.
They've been towing these nets around for a decade now.
The article says, if you give them 4 billion with a b dollars they will "clean up" the garbage patch.
No shit. Give someone a lot of money and things can be done. The problem as we all know is that there is no money available for this type of project.
If we cancelled the order of ~40 F-35s, we could have that 4 billion dollars.
If we appropriately taxed the rich, we could do it without even having to cut the precious military spending.
Sorry, neither can be done. Taxing the richies would be tantamount to communism. Cutting the military spending? Countries have to fight wars behalf of the corpos.
Sure, wake me up when either of those things happen
The weird thing is that money isn't real. It's just an arbitrary idea of how much somebody thinks someone/something else is worth. When was the last time we had enough gold to back up all the money promises in the world? That was a long long long time ago.
LOL. Yeah but we only do quantative easing to save bankers and billionaires, not to save the world.
I love news like this.
Btw, I assume this is referring to garbage that is floating. What about the garbage that has sunk? I mean, I don't even know whether it's a big problem, especially in the middle of the ocean, but I am still curious what's up with that.
This is good news, but the claims to cleanup the patch in its “entirety” are misleading. The garbage patch also extends to the ocean floor. This is merely the surface garbage.
I wish them well. It feels good to be reminded that yes, there are still people out there trying to make things better. ❤️
Everyone can be that. Stop eating meat and drop water-pollution, land-use and co2-emissions by two thirds. Less destruction, instantly.
Imagine one billion people doing that. Animal agriculture, one of the most evil industries, would shrink by a lot, our planet would change. No need for politicians, no need to spend a lot of money, no need to lobby. You just buy a different product next time you shop groceries at the supermarket. 💚
While yes, consuming less meat and especially cow (dairy, beef) is good for you and the environment, your 2/3 statistic falls a part with actual data
https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector
Get your statistics right or don’t say them at all.
I really need to stop making excuses and stop eating meat. I think I'm going to start tomorrow. I dunno why but this thread really is motivating me.
Wouldn't just a reduction in meat consumption be enough? Though looking at how much the average is that will probably need to be a very significant reduction frI'm some people.
Solar farms go well with grazing animals, recently heard it can actually increase the grass yields when you add solar panels, think it helps protect it a bit from strong wind and too much sun that can dry out the soil more and stunt growth.
Also any time you hear people complain about "prime farmland" (that is so shit they only ever use it for grazing) being used for solar "instead of food production" be aware it's very likely bullshit anti-solar propaganda. It's very common here in the UK.
I would prefer for the giant polluting corporations to do something that’s actually useful. Enjoy veganism though.
nice generalizations
If you give me 7.5 billion i’ll do my very best to clean up the ocean too
This is /c/upliftingnews. I’ll take what I can get ☺️
That's like 0.8% of the US military budget for 2025. That's basically a rounding error
Better that than it going to Tesla or whatever.
Yes, but it's a war, and they are losing to people making things much, much worse.