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.
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?
Finally able to cum silly strings
To cum like a 3D printer (same nozzle temperature too).
So that’s how babby is formed
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.
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.
I found this with three clicks on project’s web site:
“Once our containers are full of plastic onboard, we bring them back to shore for recycling. For each system batch, we are making durable and sustainable products. Supporters getting the products will help fund the continued ocean cleanup. Catch, rinse, recycle and repeat - until the oceans are clean. The sunglasses are a proof of concept for this.”
It might not seem like much yet, but it’s better than nothing, and we have to start somewhere.
It might not seem like much yet, but it’s better than nothing
I’ve been hearing this line repeated ad nauseum since the 80s. Occasionally they pan out, but far more often you’re looking at a Google Graveyard of underfunded ideas and abandoned projects.
In this case “we’re going to turn the Texas Garbage Patch into sunglasses” doesn’t fill me with excitement.
“No, I am not at all cynical, I have merely got experience, which, however, is very much the same thing.” - Oscar Wilde
doesn’t fill me with excitement.
I’m skeptical too, but I choose to retain some optimism in a world with so much terrible stuff. This project seems to have more than zero potential, without introducing obvious great harm.
Only using the plastic junk to make more plastic trinkets is not successfully recycling, no matter how they market it as such. It needs to be used for practical value products at least in part or it’s just another way of reformatting the trash
We all look forward to the success of your superior alternative.
People will say this to pretend you shouldn’t criticize any incentives that have decent effects. Cleaning it and putting in landfills is better than oceans. But making more trash to be thrown out isn’t solving anything
I literally have a pair of the sunglasses I bought many years ago when they first came out.
How is that trash, please explain.
You’re not wrong. Stuff like construction materials would be better. Hopefully this is a step towards that.
I understand the cynicism, but I’m not going to let it distract me from the good that is being done.
You can hold space for both, and both can be true at the same time and not invalidate each other. Optimism is a hugely important quality, it’s focusing on moving forward and seeing the glass half full, and it keeps the darkness out. Pointing out problems is just troubleshooting, and finding ways to be better, that might seem like focusing on the glass half empty, but what if it’s just focusing on achieving a better half full, glass. The important thing is to hold onto what keeps you afloat, especially right now. This is awesome news, whether it needs more work or not.
Isn’t the majority of plastic in the ocean caused by fishing?
It’s the largest individual source, by far. Whether or not it accounts for the majority depends on the exact stats you’re looking at
What stats are at choice besides fraction of total mass?
It’s more about which study or source you’re looking at than what measure is used. It’s tough to estimate stuff like this so different people get different answers.
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.
finally, i don’t have to think even a second about my individually plastic wrapped candies
Glass. Always has been.
These individually glass wrapped candies make my mouth hurt.
Oh, I read that as candles.
Yeah, candies is (wax)paper. Easy.
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)
Absolutely and that is great, but by root cause I mean how much plastic is on every fucking thing we buy, the source is not the rivers feeding into the ocean, it’s our usage, and disregard for the environment
There are shades of gray. I consider burying it in well managed landfills (what is done with the very large majority of plastic in developed countries) significantly more environmentally responsible than dumping it into the local river (what is done with most plastic in many developing countries) or ocean (fishing nets, cruise ships).
Yes it is better, no doubt, but still doesn’t resolve the root cause
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No. Much plastic comes from fishermen in the ocean.
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
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.
How will the aliens know that it isn’t worth contacting us?
Radio signals 1935-current
Can you imagine if they could hear radio? Our planet would be screaming noise constantly
True. We are a garbage species.
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.
Do you think The Ocean Cleanup isn’t aware of this?
I’m sure they are, and while it is good news. Claims of cleaning up the patch in its “entirety” are misleading.
No one but you mentioned “entirety”.
Great Pacific Garbage Patch = merely some of the surface garbage
Fully possible.
