Why it’s almost impossible to clean up the ocean, but we have to try anyway

Jordan I know that our world is changing rapidly. Intellectually, I understand that. I can even wrap my head around most of the ways it’s happening. Climate change brings more storms, more heat waves, politics turns towards a rising authoritarianism. In technology, virtual worlds spring up like the Metaverse that we’re supposed to eventually live and work in. And billionaires are planning to go to Mars. I get all that. But one thing I find it difficult to comprehend are the world’s great garbage patches.

Pacific Garbage Patch Clip …the great Pacific garbage patch measures 1.6 million km². That is three times the size of France…

Jordan The idea that there are gigantic fields of plastic sitting there at the centre of where currents meet in the ocean on that kind of scale, and that we are struggling not only to clean them up, but just to keep them from getting bigger, boggles my mind. And I don’t think I’m alone. I know this because if you take a spin around the environmental and science-inclined areas of social media, you will find dozens, if not hundreds, of startup efforts trying to tackle this problem that are begging for funding and volunteers. These strategies range from basics like, hey, let’s go and clean up the beaches with our hands. To more ambitious projects like let’s make a fleet of gigantic ocean sweepers that will capture hundreds of tons of plastic at a time, in humongous nets. To innovative ideas that sit somewhere in the middle, like, let’s create a way to find and catch all the plastic at the mouth of about 1000 rivers before it meets the ocean. All of these projects mean well. All of them have the same goal. But they all take money and time and commitment. So where should we focus? Which plans to save our ocean from plastic have the best chance to actually work? Which are actually doable and which are dreams? And what happens if we choose the wrong ones?

I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings this is The Big Story. Ryan Stuart is a freelance writer based on Vancouver Island. He covers a lot of topics but focuses extensively, as he did on this piece on the environment. Hey, Ryan.

Ryan Hello. How are you?

Jordan I’m doing well, thanks. I hope you guys are safe out there. I know BC has been a disaster recently.

Ryan It has been, I’m luckily a little outside of a disaster area, though, so it hasn’t been too bad here, just a bit soggy.

Jordan Well, that’s good to hear. I’ve seen all sorts of social media videos, the kind of feel good stuff about something called the ocean cleanup. Can you just begin with a bit about that initiative? What is it?

Ryan So the ocean clean up was a pretty audacious idea that this teenager had, and he had this idea that why don’t we use the wind and the currents of the ocean to corral all the ocean plastic into these giant booms? So sort of, like you’re corralling your cattle into a corral, but using the wind and the currents, that are quite consistent, to move it all. So there’s these big, huge garbage patches where ocean currents kind of push all this plastic together into quite concentrated areas in the centre of all the oceans. He was like, let’s just use these floating booms and just let them collect it. We’ll hold them kind of stationery and all the ocean garbage will just float right into them. We kind of grab it all up and haul it away. And that’ll be the solution.

They have raised a lot of money, $35 million or so of money to do this, lots of publicity, lots of media attention, and they attempted it two or three times and had major issues with it. The booms would fall apart or it just wouldn’t collect garbage. The waves would kind of push the garbage right over top of the booms or right under the booms, and things like that. They did succeed in collecting some garbage in 2019, but they’re way behind the schedule that they were talking about. And it definitely seems like it’s been a challenge for them to pull that one off.

Jordan We’re going to talk about them specifically and about other efforts to clean up the ocean. But maybe you could also give us a sense of the scale of the problem. Do we know how much plastic is in the ocean and how much is being added to it every day?

Ryan Well, the estimates vary widely. Obviously it’s really hard to figure that out, to know exactly how much is coming in and where it’s all coming from and all these sorts of things. But a few people have tried to put numbers on it. The one that I’ve seen is kind of around 8 million tons of plastic every year enters the ocean. And that’s the equivalent of a garbage truck every minute dumping plastic garbage into the ocean.

Jordan What are the long term impacts of that much plastic?

Ryan Well, you can look at it in a lot of different ways. On wildlife, there are estimates that a million seabirds, 100,000 mammals a year are being killed by eating the plastic. I was up on Haida Gwaii this summer, which is an archipelago of islands off the northeast BC coast, and there was a humpback whale washed up on the beach there. And the beaches there are spectacular, beautiful. You don’t see a lot of garbage or plastic on them, but that whale had starved because its belly was full of plastic. So things like that.

I talked to one researcher who figures in a couple of hundred years, you’ll be able to go back and take samples of the ocean floor. If you kind of took a soil sample of the ocean floor, you would see a layer of plastic running right through it. That’s how much plastic is sort of settling down into the ocean.

And then there’s the human impact. Just production of plastic. It’s a Petroleum product, the chemicals it gives off in the different stages of its production. And then there’s the impact of just plastic pollution on something as simple as the cost to clean it up off of the beach in front of a Mexican hotel or on real estate or harbours and places like that that need to clean up the plastic out of them as well. So there’s a lot of different ways of calculating it. And people have tried putting numbers on it. Estimates range from $6 billion to 2.5 trillion a year on the cost of plastic. So it’s a hard number to come up with. It’s a hard number to figure out, but it’s huge and it’s massive, the damage it does.

Jordan So we know this is a problem. It’s been a problem for years. It’s clearly not getting better. What has been tried to clean it? You mentioned Ocean Cleanup, which we’re going to talk more about in a minute, but it’s far from the only effort that is trying to raise funds to clean up the ocean.

Ryan Yeah. There’s all kinds of stuff going on. One of the interesting things about writing this article is just every one you found, you found another one, you found another one, and it just kept adding up. It’s something that so many people are working on. There’s everything from very humble beach cleanups. We have one of the most successful here in Canada, the great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup, which does incredible work every year, cleaning up beaches all around the country, rivers, oceans, Lakes. The whole works. To autonomous drones that are sent out into the water to sort of suck it up like a whale shark or like a whale feeding, that kind of style of sucking in the plastic in the water. To programs that pay people to clean up plastic, pay fishermen to give their nets over when they’re kind of getting close to the end of their life, so they don’t end up breaking out at sea and then losing them.

And even right down to sort of nanotechnology, trying to find ways of cleaning up the tiny, tiny little bits of plastic that are in almost every water source on Earth right now, just these tiny little bits that break off of bigger pieces of plastic. Essentially as it breaks down, it turns into these micro plastics. Even the clothing, any kind of synthetic clothing, when you wash it, it breaks down into these microfibers that end up in our water systems. And none of our waste system treatments are able to collect them. So they end up out in the rivers and the Lakes and the oceans as well. So people are trying to figure out how to collect those as well. So a huge range.

Jordan So many people working on this problem, so many great ideas, the plastics can’t be long for the ocean, right? This is all going to work. No problem.

Ryan Yeah. You’d love to be hopeful about these sorts of things, but the more I looked into it, the more of a challenge this is.

Jordan What are the problems that these potential solutions don’t tend to account for?

Ryan The biggest problem is where the plastic’s coming from. There’s about 2 billion people on Earth who don’t have garbage pickup. It’s something we take for granted here, I think in a lot of ways, and we have somewhere to put our garbage. But in a lot of places, there isn’t somebody coming around to pick it up every week. There aren’t garbage bins on every street corner. And so your garbage bin becomes the ditch in front of your house or the back alley or somewhere that you burn it. And a lot of that plastic, when it rains, gets washed into rivers, which then flow into oceans.

And that’s by far, the majority of plastic in the ocean comes down a river first, and it’s because there aren’t good systems for cleaning it up, for collecting it and disposing of it properly in a lot of places. And that’s only getting worse as populations grow, and they have no way of disposing it properly. And then I’d say that the second one is just the nature of plastic, and the way we use it. We produce a lot of Virgin plastic. It’s a lot cheaper and better quality than recycled plastic is. And so because of that, we end up making more, and we just constantly make more, and only so much of it can be recycled. Only so much of it is recycled. And so that’s a huge contributor as well.

Jordan Let’s go back to Ocean Clean Up for a minute just because it’s so ambitious and it’s been kind of highlighted, I think, and you can correct me if I’m wrong, as one of the biggest of these various efforts that you’ve described and maybe tell me a little bit more about how it should work and why it doesn’t work. And maybe you could start just by describing the Great Pacific Garbage patch and where this stuff is and what they’re trying to do about it.

Ryan Sure. I think the easiest way to think about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch or any of these garbage patches because they are all over the world in the different oceans, is we have these consistent winds that blow across the ocean, and they create these gyres, they’re called. And they’re basically ocean currents that move in a big circle motion around the ocean. So take the North Pacific, we have a big circular motion of current that’s spinning around the ocean, and it’s slowly pushing all the garbage into the centre. And the currents continue to move around it so there’s no way for that garbage to get out. So it all concentrates in this central area. I think they describe it as about the size of Texas.

When people have sailed through it or motor through this sort of area, they talk about just a sea of garbage, literally just garbage everywhere. So the idea was that they would create these big, huge booms, you can think of it as a big pool noodle that went around in sort of a Horseshoe shape. And I think the original idea was that they’d sort of anchor it in place and the garbage would just float in there. And then every now and then they’d come in there and scoop all the garbage out. And I think it’s more evolved to this point where they’ll have some kind of boat or something pulling it or holding it in place as the garbage sort of comes in and collects in it.

Once they’ve gotten it to work, the biggest hurdles with it are that it doesn’t clean up as much garbage as I think they were hoping it would. On the surface, it looks like there’s tons of plastic there, when you dive down, there’s even more throughout the water column right down to the bottom. This only collects a small percentage of the plastic right along the surface.

And when people, scientists, mathematicians have crunched the numbers on these things, they say that Ocean Clean Up’s estimates of how long and how quickly they can clean up the ocean are just totally not anywhere near right. Their estimate was 20 years to do a pretty good job of cleaning up the ocean. And when one study kind of crunched all the numbers, they figured it would take till 2150 to just clean up 5%. I think the biggest issue with the ocean clean up is not that it’s a nice idea and that it does clean up plastic, and it does all those sorts of things. It just is not an effective use of money.

Jordan Do we have any idea what of the various proposals or even just the various things that haven’t been tried yet might be a more effective use of that money? Not to say people shouldn’t give to Ocean Cleanup or whatever they feel. If we wanted to maximize the return on investment in terms of keeping plastic out of the ocean or getting plastic out of the ocean, where would we put that money?

Ryan Well, a lot of people think we should put it towards garbage cleanup. Those sources on land, those 2 billion people that don’t have any kind of place to put garbage. I mean, it’s a massive problem in itself. And even the people that advocate for that admit that it’s basically impossible to keep up with population growth. And so then the next kind of idea is to then think about where can we target garbage or the plastic in the most concentrated places? And the research there shows that like I mentioned earlier, that a lot of it comes down rivers.

And so there’s an effort, even by the Ocean Cleanup, they diversified about five or six years ago when they realized that a huge percentage of it came down the rivers to get to the oceans. And so they diversified. And they have this thing called an interceptor now, and it’s a barge that you anchor on the edge of a river. And it’s got some boom systems that work with it to sort of corral or steer any plastic floating down a river into the interceptor, which then pulls it out of the river, and then it can be disposed of properly.

The research shows that there are about 1000 rivers on Earth that are the source of a huge percentage of the plastic that ends up in the ocean. And so targeting those rivers, putting those interceptors and other river type clean up devices that have been developed. So they all kind of work the same of just sort of skimming plastic off the surface. That would be a major efficient use of funds to clean up the plastic would be to intercept it there in the rivers.

And then the next place I think, plastic often collects in harbours. And in fact, this morning, I saw a program in Toronto harbour, where the University of Toronto was doing some research on how plastic moves around Toronto harbour as it comes down the rivers around Toronto. And they put plastic into these rivers, these little bottles with a tracker in it, and were able to watch how they moved around the harbour. And so we are using that information now to find systems. I think they’re going to use a product called the Seabin that funnels water, just the top part of the water into these bins and collects the plastic out of it. So by understanding how the plastic is moving once it gets into, like, a harbour or something like that, they’re able to really target those things in a very efficient way.

And then the commercial fishing industry. Living here in Vancouver Island, if you go out to some of the remote beaches on our West Coast in particular, you wade through fishing floats and old nets and ropes and things like that. It’s a huge amount of the garbage and the plastic at sea is from the fishing industry. So any efforts that sort of target those sources of plastic seem to be really effective as well.

Jordan That sounds like something that is close to impossible to do at the scale needed, like around the world. You mentioned 1000 or so rivers, and God knows how many harbours, and it feels like trying to put your finger in a dike and hold back the water.

Ryan It does feel like that. The one thing that makes me hopeful, though, is that there are so many people working on this. The better we understand where the plastic comes from and how well different sort of strategies work, we’re going to get more effective and efficient with it and do a better job. I think it also is hopeful that people really value the ocean. Anyone that spends time on it really hates to see plastic and really wants to do something about it. And so that does give me hope. But it’s a huge problem. And you see some of the pictures from some places in the world that really have serious plastic issues, and you just look at it and you cringe really.

Jordan So lastly then, what’s the best use of someone’s time and money if they’re listening to this episode and they want to give either of them right to Ocean Cleanup or just get a stick in a bag and go down to your local beach?

Ryan Well, that’s probably the easiest thing to do is go down to a beach and pick up what you find. Any plastic there. I mean, it’s doing a better job of recycling at home. I’m as guilty as anyone, you get the disgusting plastic bag or the Ziploc that held who knows what, and you’re like, I could wash this out and dispose it properly or recycle it…

Jordan Do the dirty work.

Ryan Exactly. There’s lots of products out there now that you can make those decisions, you can choose to buy something that wasn’t made with plastic, or you can buy a ski jacket or something like that that’s made with recycled plastic now. So there’s lots of little things we can do in those areas. I think that’s important, is encouraging that circular economy of plastics.

Donating to any of the programs. Like I said, I think the ones that are most effective are ones that target the commercial fishing industry, harbours and rivers. And those, to me seem to be the ones that are going to have the biggest impact. And then obviously anything that can help with garbage collection. So I’d say those are the four that if I was giving advice on where to put some donation money that those would be the ones I would target, is some of those programs.

Jordan I want to ask you one more thing, actually, that I’ve been thinking about. We cover a lot of climate change issues on this show, and so often we talk about how politicians and companies kind of put the onus on the individual to do something to make little sacrifices in your own life. And that’s how you’re going to stop this, as opposed to putting the blame back on the polluters who do it at scale, which tend to be the oil companies or companies around the world. Is it fair to say and please correct me if I’m wrong, that this is one of the unique climate change issues that actually can be impacted on an individual basis.

Ryan Wow, it’s a hard question, isn’t it? I mean, you can look at it in both ways. The one aspect is like all those things. I just said, we can make those individual choices. We can make those individual actions, we can make our individual donations and have an impact. But I do think there’s a role for governments, for the international community, for businesses to also step up and do more to encourage the circular economy of plastic.

It needs incentives for it to happen. It’s cheaper to make Virgin plastic than it is to recycle plastic. And so until that changes, it’s very hard to create that huge economy of recycling plastic that we need and the research that needs to happen to make it more efficient. Each time you recycle it, it goes down a level. So your hard plastic bottle then becomes soft plastic bag and your soft plastic bag becomes… I don’t even know if they can recycle that effectively. So a true cost of accounting for the life of a piece of plastic. And if you had that sort of like, the incentive to recycle a beer can or a pop can with your piece of plastic, then all of a sudden it becomes worthwhile.

There is a program actually started by some Canadians called Plastic Bank, and it operates in a few different countries. And that’s what they’ve done is they’ve created a value for plastic and it encourages people to go out and pick it up and they bring it in and they get paid to do that. It becomes they get paid by the pound of the plastic, and they can use that money in a natural store there or as cash in hand. And it’s things like that that will, I think, help as well. But I think that the governments and corporations that use plastic that make plastic, there’s got to be an accounting there where they take a little more responsibility for the product they’re putting out there and it’s entire life cycle.

Jordan Ryan, thank you so much for this. Really helpful, fascinating stuff.

Ryan Thanks for your interest. I appreciate it.

Jordan Ryan Stuart wrote about the efforts to clean up the ocean in Hakai Magazine.

That was The Big Story, for more from us head to thebigstorypodcast.ca, find us on Twitter at @TheBigStoryFPN. Talk to us via email, thebigstorypodcast@rci.rogers.com [click here!].

And as always, check us out in every podcast player, Apple or Google or Stitcher or Spotify. By the way, if you have any ideas of what we should do to mark the end—oh, thank God—of 2021, we would love to hear them. Should we just have an audio party? Should we throw a little retrospective of the year that was? Should we forget about this year and look forward to the next one? You let us know. We’ll think about it and we’ll talk to you about that in December.

In the meantime, I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings, thanks for listening, and we’ll talk tomorrow.

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