The Ocean Cleanup Begins

 

The Ocean Cleanup project, the brainchild of a Dutch youth called Boyan Slat, has finally begun. A fleet of ships have sailed into the Pacific Ocean to deploy "Jennies", the specially designed devices invented by Slat to clear up all the toxic material in the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch". This area of the sea, trapped by circulating currents, contains millions of tons of floating and suspended plastic rubbish. They range in size from beer crates and dustbin liners to microscopic fragments. Plastic takes a long time to decompose. It is estimated that discarded plastic in landfill sites will be there for almost five hundred years; hence the drive for recycling. Plastic does terrible damage to the earth's biosphere. Large animals like turtles sometimes try to eat plastic bags, mistaking them for jellyfish, and choking. Fishing lines and nets entangle whales and dolphins. Tiny fragments enter the bodies of fish and sharks poisoning their systems and affecting their fertility. The failure of human communities to process and store discarded plastic has led to it becoming litter in many parts of the world, especially India and China. It then is washed into rivers by the rain and from there into the sea. It is swept by currents until it ends up in "gyres", circular currents far from land. Solving this problem has become one of the most urgent conservation necessities in the world. It really made me happy to see the project underway. The Ocean Cleanup actually inspired me to write a scene in my novel Roswell Redeemed- Humanity After Disclosure, see: http://hpanwo-bb.blogspot.com/2018/12/roswell-redeemed-is-here.html. I called the rubbish collection devices in the story "slat-booms" in honour of Boyan Slat. Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLcnJEMnlTs. It is a sweet irony that at the same time an autistic teenage girl from Sweden is in Glasgow screeching about the need for global government to halt the emissions of a completely benign natural atmospheric gas that has no effect at all on the climate and is actually essential for life on earth, another young person from the Netherlands is doing something practical to rid the planet of a genuine threat to the natural world. If I were his father I would feel deeply proud of him. There are several dozen "garbage patches" across the world's oceans so cleansing the entire hydrosphere will be a major task that will take many years, but the first step has now been taken so others can follow. The project is also working on ways to prevent plastic reaching the sea in the first place with booms across rivers. The ultimate prevention can only really come from nations and communities improving their rubbish disposal and recycling systems.
See here for background: https://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2021/11/climate-change-portal.html.

And: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2015/10/our-dying-oceans.html.