There are a handful of nonprofits out there working on collecting all the plastic trash from the open ocean. It is a difficult task that can be dangerous, time-consuming, and expensive. In the most recent mission to clean up trash floating in the sea, environmentalists pulled 40 tons (36 metric tons) of abandoned fishing nets from an area known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. These nets have been entangling whales, turtles, and fish, as well as damaging coral reefs.
They set to sea, leaving port in Hawaii on a 140-foot (43-meter) cargo sailboat outfitted with a crane, in direction to the heart of the Pacific Ocean. Mary Crowley, the group’s founder, took a group of volunteers on this 25-day expedition, along with the California-based nonprofit Ocean Voyages Institute, to a marine gyre location where ocean currents converge between Hawaii and California. There, they spent their time fishing out forsaken nets.
Once returning to port in Honolulu, they separated all the trash into two categories:
- 2 tons (1.8 metric tons) of plastic trash were donated to local artists to transform it into artwork to educate people about ocean plastic pollution
- The rest of the refuse was turned over to a zero-emissions energy plant that will incinerate it and turn it into energy.
Crowley said:
Our success should herald the way for us to do larger clean ups and to inspire clean ups all throughout the Pacific Ocean and throughout the world. It’s not something that we need to wait to do.
Their mission began a year before they set sail to pick up the nets. They gave sailors going from California to Hawaii buoyant GPS trackers the size of bowling balls to attach to the nets they encountered during their voyage. These trackers would, later on, help the Sausalito, California-based group know where to go to find the trash.
When the time came for them to make their journey, the group of mariners followed the trackers that led them to collect tons of nets entangled with plastic chairs, bottles, and other trash. The total cost of their efforts was $300,000, definitely not cheap! Imagine if people just didn’t litter… but since that doesn’t seem like it will happen any time soon, the group plans to deploy dozens more GPS trackers and next year embark on a three-month trash collection expedition.
Nick Mallos, Director of the Trash Free Seas Program at Ocean Conservancy, a nonprofit environmental advocacy group, said it is estimated that between 600,000 and 800,000 metric tons of fishing gear are abandoned or lost during storms each year in the oceans. Meanwhile, according to experts, 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.
That’s a lot of garbage out there to be picked up, way too much work for just one group of environmentalists to take on! That’s why The Ocean Voyages Institute is but one of dozens of groups around the world trying to tackle the problem. Of these groups, many of them focus on cleaning up beaches, ridding shores of abandoned fishing nets, traps and other gear and pushing for a reduction on single-use plastic containers. Just a few are getting into the water.
Among them is another group making a significant impact collecting trash in the gyres called The Ocean Cleanup project which was started by Dutch innovator Boyan Slat with a vision of collecting 50% of all the garbage in the ocean within five years.
Last year they deployed a trash collection device to corral plastic litter floating in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. It is a buoyant, 2,000-foot (600-meter) long boom floating 800 miles (1,300 kilometers) from Hawaii’s coast. It recently broke, but they upgraded it and have re-deployed it already. The group has attracted quite a bit of attention with their project raising millions of dollars from donors around the world, including San Francisco billionaire Marc Benioff.
