A Quote by Boyan Slat
You go to a beach, you see a lot of plastic. It's out of the ocean, it stays out of the ocean, so that's good. But the thing is that in this Great Pacific garbage patch, this area twice the size of Texas, there's simply no coastlines to collect plastic. So the idea is to have these very long floating barriers.
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Coastlines are very effective ways of catching plastic. But the thing is, in those vast ocean garbage patches, there's simply no coastlines to catch any plastic. So we built our own artificial coastline.
I envisioned an extremely long network of floating barriers - they're like curtains floating in the ocean which are attached to the seabed. So what happens is that the current comes around and plastic gets pushed towards these barriers. And because it's in a V-shape, the plastic gets push towards the center.
There is a gyre of discarded floating plastic the size of the continental USA in the ocean. In it, plastic trash outweighs plankton 40 to 1.
About once a month, a vessel visits each of these clean-up systems, almost like a garbage truck of the ocean, would bring the plastic back to shore where it would then be processed and recycled into new products that we would then sell, at a premium, of course, because we could sell it as being made out of ocean plastic.
I'll tell you what me scares me is plastic. Plastic bags and plastic bottles and these things. Why does my water have to be in a bloody plastic bottle? The landfill and the ocean. And I don't know, I'm just terrified with the proliferation of plastic.
Plastic debris in the ocean was thought to accumulate in big patches, mostly in subtropical gyres - big currents that converge in the middle of the ocean - but scientists estimate that only about 1 percent of plastic pollution is in these gyres and other surface waters in the open ocean.
The concentration of plastic is rapidly increasing in the gyres. Even if you were to close off the tap, and no more plastic entered the ocean, that plastic would stay there, probably for hundreds of years.
We have lots of other problems with plastic in our oceans. There are five different big gyres of plastic out in the ocean. There are problems with air pollution around the country that we need to deal with, and around the world. We have a great many problems to overcome, so I work on a lot of different boards trying to help in those important areas.
Go to the east shore of any of the Hawaiian Islands, and that's a pretty big lesson on how much plastic is ending up in the ocean. Basically, the Hawaiian Islands act as a filter out in the middle of the Pacific.
The number one issue that Ocean Mysteries has opened my eyes to is, no matter where you are, whether you're on a beach in Hawaii, you're diving in the Pacific, you're in a remote archipelago, or you're in the middle of nowhere - I am blown away and sobered and crushed, emotionally crushed, by the amount of marine debris, of garbage, that is now in our ocean.
Economic activity is moving from the Atlantic ocean to the Pacific ocean... Russia has a certain natural advantage because it also borders the Pacific Ocean.
We absolutely need to clean up the plastic that's already in the ocean. It won't go away by itself. But we do also need to make sure that no more plastic enters the oceans in the first place. These things should go hand in hand.
Truly, the only way to prove that we can rid the oceans of plastic is to actually go out there and deploy the world's first ocean-cleaning system.
Mineral water is a preposterous vanity, either bottled in glass which is stupidly heavy to freight, or in plastic that ends up in one of the plastic patches the size of Texas occupying our oceans.
Ocean plastic in particular has captured the public imagination, and seems to be a jumping-off point for several companies developing plastic alternatives, both in source material and in the pollution they are trying to prevent.
Plastic doesn't have to be ocean plastic pollution.
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