Giant plastic catcher heads for Pacific Ocean clean-up

I disagree with the first clause of this point. I think it's better to prevent environmental messes to begin with. Don't get me wrong, I'm not denigrating cleaning up messes, that's important too. We'd be fucked it we couldn't clean up after ourselves. But from my perspective, a moderate amount of effort in the present can spare having to spend a greater amount of effort in the future.

That said, I'm glad work is being done to clean plastics from the ocean, hope it continues, and hope it is successful.

I want to discuss this point. I think some people are reading this as "clean up >>>>> prevention", which I don't think is your point. Rather, your point is more along the lines of the Agile Manifesto (we value X over Y, doesn't mean we don't value Y).

Clean up is more important now because we've created a mess and can't simply discard it. In quality control (for companies) it is more important to improve quality (reduce messes, by analogy) because that reduces the amount of time spent in later rework (cleanup, in this analogy). However, companies have the option of discarding (deletion if it's digital, recycling or trashing if it's physical) their inventory. Deletion and recycling waste nothing but the time initially spent on it. Trashing, however, is an option for a company because they're not in a closed system. It may be expensive, but it is an option. They can close a poorly functioning facility, or a contaminated plot of land, and go down the street.

From an environmental standpoint, the planet is effectively a closed system. We can't ignore the messes that exist and just move down the street like a business might. We all need healthy oceans, healthy rivers, healthy lands. And we will run out of those things if we don't clean up the messes that presently exist.

Obviously, we still need to prevent more of them from happening. But clean up ought to be a higher priority (as a percentage of global effort) with reduction in waste and environmental impact happening simultaneously.

This is the most short sited perspective imaginable, yes cleanup is important, but we're adding to this disaster at an increasing rate. Additionally, new materials are more dangerous to the ecosystem then those already there, the existing materials have already leached their coatings and additives into the water and started to decompose, adding new plastics adds more chemicals and restarts the clock on the process of decomposition. Reducing the incoming plastics by some amount is more important then removing that same amount, and doesn't have the same risk of adding to the waste, which this project seriously does.

The quality of the recovered plastic is zero. It will be an unsortable mix of unusably degraded and potentially contaminated plastics, other buoyant waste matter and various organic material. This will not be something that anyone can use, it will need to be disposed of, which is a huge cost this project is ignoring.

Environmentalists and experts on the marine ecosystem have been trumpeting this problem for longer than Slat has been alive. The "research published by this same group" ignores the huge amount of previous research that has been conducted, and ignored the existing studies that showed the depth of the plastics reaches as far as 100m, putting any numbers they suggest into question.

We need both actually. Stopping the manufacture of junk plastic will not cause the oceans to become cleaner. It will just stop them from getting worse. But in order to make the oceans cleaner, you need to actually remove the pollution that is in them.

Hence, we need to do both.

Investing in waste management infrastructure in the communities that live along the riverbanks would reap an immediate benefit to the people so affected, and stop pollution at the source.

>Slat replies that there is not an either-or solution. “We need to do both,” he says. “We need to intercept plastic before it becomes ocean plastic. And we need to clean up what is out there.” Eriksen says that plastic on the high seas is mostly lost or discarded fishing gear. Fishermen could be paid or encouraged to collect it, which he says has worked reasonably well in the North Sea. The rest will eventually break down.

From your link. The last part is why we should get rid of it now, because it breaks down into the micro-plastics that marine life inevitably ends up consuming.

it could make large bundles/cubes of plastic material which could then be transported back to land by other ships.

The problem with any collection-based solution such as this or the one being discussed in the article, is that the scale of the infrastructure and associated transport, maintenance, and support systems, required to actually collect a meaningful amount of waste would be far more damaging to the environment then the plastic waste itself, and would very likely introduce more waste and pollution into the environment.

This project is 100% BS. I do quantitative work in ocean conservation, and I can tell you everyone just considers Boyan a scam artist.