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Comment by gizmo | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately the approaches taken by Ocean Cleanup make no sense. What Ocean Cleanup is doing isn't new, they're trying strategies that have previously been tried and found to be uneconomical/ineffective. This startup has received a lot of flak from experts for a reason: they're big on hype but haven't produced any results. Sending big diesel powered boats into the sea to collect a few thousand pounds of plastic is a joke.

If the goal is to capture a gigantic amount of plastic cheaply, just place nets where polluted rivers in southeast Asia meet the sea. Those rivers carry all the plastic waste from the cities to the sea, so that's where the focus should be. But cleaning the rivers in poor parts of the world isn't a sexy hi-tech problem that results in TED talks. So Ocean Cleanup will continue to make more solar-powered autonomous boondoggles and they will accomplish nothing.

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...Which is why they built the interceptor which grabs plastic exactly at the source. As their CEO argues, you need to do both. Remove legacy ocean garbage and prevent newer garbage as well.

https://theoceancleanup.com/rivers/

It would surprise me if nets at the mouths of rivers didn't royally screw up the wildlife and/or boat traffic. And what do they do with that plastic they trap? The root problem is those societies have no better way to dispose of plastic than letting it drift to sea. Proper waste collection and disposal services are far preferable to installing a net and telling everyone, "Yo it's ok to throw all your trash in the river now."

This startup is long on hype and has zero results. Ok they spent tons of money to collect a few lbs of trash. The CEO was on Joe Rogan last month telling everyone he was going to clean up half the patch in 5 years (not even sure what that means since it's constantly growing). How much did those ships cost to run per day though? $50k. So he doesn't even have a working POC if you factor in costs. He's just out there on a premature victory tour, doing more harm than good by convincing people that someone else has solved the plastic problem for them. What a hero.

This is an impressive level of negativity.

Is it? What cleaned up my country's rivers of plastic after many failed projects was a government program of paying for returned plastic bottles. In poor countries (and that's where the most of plastic comes from) you don't really need complex or super-smart automatic systems to do this job as manual work is cheap. Just pay enough for recycled plastic so that it makes a viable source of profit for those in need, and you'll have a massive army of people collecting waste much more diligent than any net or automated system.

What to do with the plastic is a separate problem that needs proper logistics, but step 1 is removing it from the oceans and rivers. That's where this program is helping.

Also the river cleanup systems are completely automated and solar powered. Where did you get the $50k number from?

It's not a zero sum game. There are other projects tackling garbage collection and processing on land as well.

> So he doesn't even have a working POC if you factor in costs.

Saying we shouldn't do something because it isn't profitable is what got us into this mess in the first place. Since we've been shitting where we eat, it's about time where we need to start eating our own shit metaphorically. It's better to do this than do nothing. If something more cost efficient comes out in a few years, sure that's great, but we don't quite have the luxury of sitting on the sidelines and waiting/hoping for that to happen.

> "Since we've been shitting where we eat, it's about time where we need to start eating our own shit metaphorically."

Not just metaphorically. Well, the shit is, but not the eating. Apparently there's plastic in our salt and drinking water now, so we are officially eating our own pollution.

I read a report that the average person consumes about a credit card each week.

Edit: A simple google search returns a ton of hits https://phys.org/news/2019-06-consume-credit-card-worth-plas...

If we stopped producing all plastic right now, the oceans would still be full of plastic. Even if we treat the source we'll still need to clean up. The damage has already been done. It won't go away on it's own over time.

It's much cheaper to prevent plastic reaching the ocean than cleaning it up after, so that's where the focus should be. It's not a matter of the damage "already been done". All additional plastic that ends up in the ocean is still bad. Estimates are that 10% of all plastics produced annually ends up in the ocean, about 10 million tonnes annually. That's a staggering amount.

The great pacific garbage patch -- as mentioned in the article -- is twice the size of Texas, but the garbage density is low: only 4 parts per m3. And only 5% of the garbage is at the surface (10 meters deep or so). That's what makes the cleanup fiendishly difficult. So let's focus on the low hanging fruit first.

I'm not saying Ocean Cleanup is good at what they're doing. I'm just saying we have no choice but to get good at cleaning up the plastic that is there, because it's not going away on it's own and no amount of prevention will reverse time.

As I've mentioned elsewhere, I also have no confidence that all nations involved in polluting will stop and I suspect we'll still be putting plastic into the ocean for decades to come. Being better at cleaning the ocean may actually be the low-hanging fruit.

Microbes are probably the best answer. There is already evidence that they are eating a large proportion of the plastics and oil that is dumped / spilled into the ocean. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/05/these-tiny-microbes-...

> so that's where the focus should be.

See this a lot. You are using your own limited attention span to argue that others shouldn't be doing the work they are doing because you can only think about one problem at a time. There are 7.7 billion people on this Earth damn it, we can and should work on multiple different parts of a problem at once. The garbage which is in the oceans needs to extracted (and extracted now, before it gets ground into microplastics), and as others have mentioned, other people are working on catching runoff waste at river sources.

I never really understood people who shout from the sidelines that people who are actually working their asses off on the problem are doing it wrong. Have a little more respect.

Not to mention that there are other projects focus on stopping garbage creation at the source of consumers with creating garbage collection and processing programs in these 3rd world areas.

I don’t really have any stats to support either view but the key point is this, if accurate

> It's much cheaper to prevent plastic reaching the ocean than cleaning it up

We may have 7.7 billion people but less than 0.1% are free and down to work on climate clean up so that doesn’t matter. If one activity is relatively inefficient then it probably shouldn’t be done. The argument here is that you can bail water with a teaspoon or you can plug the hole in the boat. Detractors are saying don’t waste your time with the tea spoon, and you’re saying “well at least it helps!”

Similar arguments apply to whether we should burn garbage or not depending on the price of natural gas, or whether or not we should use energy to pull carbon from the sky. Again I don’t know if the detractors are correct but I wouldn’t be shocked if true.

As many other commenters have pointed out, they are already doing river cleanup with fully deployed systems in many rivers.

If anything, they don't need to focus on one thing because they've shown to be perfectly capable of attacking both challenges effectively.

A quick calculation suggests they would need 10,000 of their river Interceptors, assuming each interceptor can fill a garbage truck worth of plastic daily. That would reduce the amount of plastic dumped in the sea by the 1000 most polluted rivers by about half.

Building, maintaining, and operating 10,000 Interceptors is a huge undertaking, and it requires their full effort and attention.

To my knowledge they currently only have a few prototype Interceptors that don't work very well. They're certainly nowhere near the point where they can build river trash interceptors at scale. Prototypes are relatively easy. Building big machines that work all day every day without breaking down is super hard.

There's only 10 rivers that are the 90% of trash: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/06/90-of-plastic-polluti...

And sure, if they want to launch across 1000 rivers it's going to be a big project. So what? Nobody said it was easy. It seems like your argument is that... they can't do it because it's hard?

If they fail then nothing changes. But they've already started and have the designs finished with the version 2 interceptors working well. Something is better than nothing.

Absolutely. Cleanup is not the whole solution, but part of the solution. We still need to cut down on our plastic use.

And by "we" I don't mean just Europe and the US, though we are definitely culprits too, but I recently learned that about a third of the plastic in the Pacific comes from a single river in China. Filtering it there, or making Chinese more aware of the problem of plastic waste, is absolutely vital.

Still, the cleanup is a great idea.

But aren't stopping plastic production.

So that means we need to be as efficient as possible in fixing this, and cleaning the ocean is much more work compared to filtering the mouths of the 10 or so main polluting rivers in Asia.

I agree, we need prevention and cleanup, and we can do both at once, but we must learn to clean the ocean because the plastic is already there.

It's like spilling your lego all over the floor, then saying no we don't need to clean those up, we should focus on making sure we never spill lego again. Even if we stopped all lego from ever spilling, we still have a floor full of lego, so we need to learn how to clean up our lego still.

Ocean plastics have a finite lifespan. A significant percentage is unusually stable and lasts more than 20 years, but quite a bit is breaking down every day.

Assuming they could scale this to 20,000 trips per year for 6 billion dollars every year, they might reduce the rate of new plastics by 10%. However, this does not scale as it depended on a specific unusual situation.

And then it breaks down in to smaller bits that the fish can eat and die.

No, you’re describing what happens during the break down process. Afterwards it’s not plastic.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4802224/

There's actually disagreement about oceans self cleaning (or not).

From https://inhabitat.com/the-fallacy-of-cleaning-the-gyres-of-p... (and Flotsametrics):

> to clean the ocean of floating plastic, you don’t need to go out and get it, it will come to you. Yep, that’s right. Oceanographer Curtis Ebbsmeyer, author of, Flotsametrics [33] describes a rarely talked about phenomena that occurs naturally in the ocean called Gyre Memory. Gyre Memory demonstrates that upon each orbit of a gyre, the gyre will spit out about half its contents. These contents will then either enter another current or gyre or wash up on land. As this repeats, it means that eventually, all the plastic in the ocean will be spit

Slat's reply, from https://theoceancleanup.com/updates/responding-to-critics:

> There is no data to support this statement. Actually, using the best models currently available (the Van Sebille and LebretonModels) we attempted to quantify the natural loss of plastics from the gyres, producing a figure of <0.1%/yr. Based on communication between our modelers and the makers of the models, we eventually decided to exclude this figure from the report, because the models are unreliable near the coast. But it’s safe to say a gyre does not spit out half of its contents per rotation. Unfortunately, it appears that the plastic that’s already trapped in the currents of the gyres does not simply go away by itself.

Nihilism and throwing your hands up and giving up won't help anything.

I think maybe you misunderstood me, the OP is being dismissive of the ocean cleanup effort because he thinks we should focus on prevention. My view is simply that prevention is important but it's too late to prevent the ocean from filling with plastic, so we still need to clean it. We need both.

> collect a few thousand pounds

In a mission to clean up trash floating in the ocean, environmentalists pulled 40 tons (36 metric tons) of abandoned fishing nets this month from an area known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

https://www.voanews.com/science-health/40-tons-fishing-nets-...

40 tons in a month by an NGO funded by donations and sponsors.

For comparison: About 60 tons (53 metric tons) of fishing nets are lost each month, reportedly. [1]

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/nov/06/dumped-f...

It would be nice if fishermen could only use certified nets that costed an hefty fee to encourage strategies to prevent loss of nets and also to provide extra funding to ocean cleanup efforts from the proceeds of these certified nets.

From my experience, small scale local fishermen are very invested in not losing nets. They are a big investments. Most would actually be very happy if nets had some form of fingerprint identification in order to combat theft and illegal fishing, especially if the police could look it up in a central register.

Regulation in this area would be a win-win for almost everyone involved.

Yet, their was more plastic in the Pacific when they left than when they started. Filtering river discharge could make a meaningful difference, what their doing is at best a publicity stunt.

Another 9 million tons (8 million metric tons) of plastic waste, including plastic bottles, bags, toys and other items, flow annually into the ocean from beaches, rivers and creeks, according to experts. So 8,000,000/year vs ~36 per month.

In other words they spent 300,000$ and reduced the oceans added plastic load that month by 0.0054%.

"Filtering river discharge could make a meaningful difference ..."

So basically, what the Ocean Cleanup project is also already doing with their Interceptor systems? https://theoceancleanup.com/rivers/

Sort of, though without the need for a boat or people on it.

My suggestion would be two different lines each collecting from over half the river. One upstream and one down so boats can still easily navigate the channel and 24/7 365 operations are cheap. Further, you need a system designed to operate in floods when the majority of plastics are washed out to sea.

And roughly 75% of that is from East Asia, so that's why people are talking about concentrating on the rivers and promoting recycling/new materials in those areas.

40 tons is about 80 thousand pounds. The above poster said "a few" thousand. 80 is usually more than a few... But, What is the scale of the problem? How much trash is there?

Maybe it is correct to think of 40 tons as not a big dent in the problem, but I'm not sure.

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