 Show The garbage collected by Ocean Cleanup's System 002 from Great Pacific Garbage Patch. A non-profit organisation has removed 100,000 kg of plastic from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (GPGP), a collection of marine debris in the North Pacific Ocean. The non-profit group, Ocean Cleanup, reached the impressive milestone earlier this week. In a release, they said that they have cleaned nearly 1/1000 of the GPGP, which is more than the combined weight of two Boeing 737-800s. Also known as the Pacific trash vortex, GPGP is an area between Hawaii and California, where plastic and other human-made litter and debris accumulate. The clean-up of the ocean was carried out by System 002 deployed by the group in August last year. "It has now collected 101,353 kg of plastic over 45 extractions, sweeping an area of ocean of over 3,000 square kilometres - comparable to the size of Luxembourg or Rhode Island," Ocean Cleanup said in the release.
"Added to the 7,173 kg of plastic captured by our previous prototype systems, The Ocean Cleanup has now collected 108,526 kg of plastic from the GPGP," it further said. The Ocean Cleanup's System 002 consists of a floating barrier with a skirt that hangs below it, under the water. It works by dragging a tensioned, artificial coastline through areas of the ocean where plastic has accumulated. Two vessels pull the system on each end, resulting in a U-shaped flexible barrier that collects the floating plastics into a retention zone. According to National Geographic, the amount of debris in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch accumulates because much of it is not biodegradable. It further said that many plastic pieces do not wear down but simply break into tinier and tinier pieces. These are called microplastics. The microplastics of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch can simply make the water look like a cloudy soup, said the outlet, adding that this soup is intermixed with larger items, such as fishing gear and shoes. Our oceans are swirling concoctions of waste that scientists have for years reported are fed by an influx of pollution from both the land and the sea. But working out what rubbish winds up in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in the North Pacific, where it comes from, and who is responsible is an ongoing challenge. Now a new study further implicates the global fishing industry in the mix. "Here we show that most floating plastics in the North Pacific subtropical gyre can be traced back to five industrialized fishing nations," data scientist Laurent Lebreton and colleagues write. When analyzing 573 kilograms of (dry) hard plastic debris collected by Lebreton and The Ocean Cleanup organization in 2019, the researchers found more than a quarter of the fragments were from 'abandoned, lost or otherwise discarded fishing gear' (aka ALDFG) – and that's not including discarded fishing nets and ropes. This waste category includes items like oyster spacers, eel traps, and lobster and fish tags, as well as plastic floats and buoys. Another third of the debris was unidentifiable. When the authors used computer models to simulate how their samples ended up in the patch, they found that a plastic fragment was 10 times more likely to originate from fishing activities than land-based ones. Indeed, simulations showed that rivers that carry waste from the land out to sea are much more likely to wash up on the beach. Less than 2 percent of simulated debris from rivers ended up offshore, carried by ocean currents. In comparison, 21 percent of trawling gear waste and 15 percent of fixed fishing gear waste drifted into the deep, and more than 85 percent of those particles never encountered land in simulations. Of all 232 plastic objects analyzed by researchers clues about their origins, roughly two-thirds were made in either Japan or China. Meanwhile, nearly 10 percent were made in South Korea, 6.5 percent came from the US, 5.6 percent came from Taiwan, and 4.7 percent from Canada. All of these nations have thriving fishing industries. "Oceanic sources such as inputs from fisheries have commonly been attributed about half of a million tonnes [of plastic waste] per year, but this estimate which has been repeatedly cited over the years, was misinterpreted from an initial study dating back to the 1970s," the authors write. "Since then, no recent, more reliable estimate has been proposed." Obviously, it's difficult to trace the origins of fragments of plastic greater than 5 centimeters floating in the sea. Fishing nets, for instance, don't usually have writing on them. Others items have degraded too much to resemble much of anything, and some are simply too small. Yet harder plastics over 5 centimeters in size can sometimes still contain brand or company names, and a few letters or characters can possibly reveal their origin. In descending order, the most common languages identified among some 200 plastic objects with recognizable text in the current study were Chinese, Japanese, English, and Korean. Nearly half of the waste products were from the twenty-first century, but one buoy dated back to 1966. When the team simulated international fishing efforts alongside ocean currents, they found China, Japan, South Korea, the US, and Taiwan probably contributed 87 percent of fishing waste to the North Pacific garbage patch each year. Compared to what the models suggested Japan should have contributed, more waste was found in the garbage patch with Japanese writing than expected. The authors think that's because the 2011 tsunami carried a bunch of waste from the nation out to sea. "These five countries were not recognized as major contributors to land-based emissions of plastics into the ocean but instead, they were identified as major fishing nations in the North Pacific Ocean," the authors write. "A greater transparency from the fishing industry and strengthened cooperation between countries to regulate and monitor the generation of ALDFG would help reduce emissions from the 'other tap' of ocean plastics." Otherwise, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is likely to keep growing. The study was published in Scientific Reports. Is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch mostly plastic?A 2018 study found that synthetic fishing nets made up nearly half the mass of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, due largely to ocean current dynamics and increased fishing activity in the Pacific Ocean. While many different types of trash enter the ocean, plastics make up the majority of marine debris for two reasons.
How large is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch 2022?How large is the garbage patch? The Ocean Cleanup estimates that the Great Pacific Garbage Patch occupies 1.6 million square kilometers, about twice the size of Texas, or three times the size of France.
How long would it take to clean up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch?Despite the scale of the problem, the nonprofit's founder, Dutch inventor Boyan Slat, says they would need about ten Jennys to clean up half of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in five years. Corryn Wetzel is a freelance science journalist based in Brooklyn.
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How much plastic is in the great pacific garbage patch
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