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Comment by mikkelam | Hacker News Reader

...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/

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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...

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