One of the biggest issues facing our oceans is plastic waste. Damage to economies, industry, and the environment is estimated to cost the world $2.5 trillion annually.
But there's hope on the horizon. A nonprofit called The Ocean Cleanup, which you might have heard of before, says they're on track to eliminate the infamous Great Pacific Garbage Patch (GPGP) within the next decade.
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The GPGP is an enormous area in the Pacific Ocean filled with plastic waste – an estimated 79,000 metric tons of it, to be exact. To put that into perspective, the patch is roughly twice the size of Texas. However, it's not a solid island of trash, but a huge environmental hazard, killing marine life, damaging ecosystems and harming human health.
Founded by then-18-year-old Boyan Slat in 2013, The Ocean Cleanup has been working on innovative ways to solve the problem of ocean plastic. Their goal is to clean up plastic from the ocean and stop more from getting there in the first place.
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They've created specialized floating systems that use ocean currents to collect plastic. Over the past three years, they've removed over one million pounds of trash from the GPGP – about 0.5% of the total.
However, they now think they can get rid of everything. The Ocean Cleanup recently declared that, given $7.5 billion in funding, they could clear the entire GPGP in 10 years. Furthermore, they believe that they might complete the project in five years at a reduced cost of $4 billion with increased assistance.
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Next year, the Ocean Cleanup will pause its operations briefly to map out "hot spots" – areas in the ocean with the most "intense plastic accumulation" – and make its future efforts even more efficient.
To raise funds, The Ocean Cleanup has also developed some creative ideas. They have turned the plastic they've collected into stylish, recyclable sunglasses that they sold for $199 each. According to the group, the proceeds from just one pair of sunglasses allowed them to clean an area the size of 24 football fields. In 2022, all the sunglasses sold out and they have reached the goal of funding the cleanup of 500,000 football fields worth of plastic.
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The problem of plastic pollution won’t go away by itself. It concerns the potential long-term harm that this material may create if action is not taken, as human health will be in danger, marine ecosystems will continue to deteriorate and the financial cost will only rise.
Boyan Slat summed it perfectly: "This environmental catastrophe has been allowed to exist, unresolved, for too long and for the first time, we can tell the world what it costs, what is needed and how long it could take. The only thing standing between us and clean oceans is money."
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