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World's First Ocean Cleanup System Isn't Yet Doing Its Job
Months after its highly anticipated deployment off the San Francisco coast, Boyan Slat's multimillion-dollar Ocean Cleanup system is not cleaning up any plastic.
"System 001"—which consists of a 600-meter-long floating pipe with a tapered 3-meter skirt attached underneath designed to catch debris—"is attracting and concentrating plastic, but not yet retaining it," the organization admitted Tuesday.
Slat explained that System 001, which has been in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch since October, might be traveling too slow to retain the plastic.
"Sometimes the system actually moves slightly slower than the plastic, which of course you don't want because then you have a chance of losing the plastic again," the 24-year-old Ocean Cleanup founder and CEO said to the AP.
Engineers are now working out how to increase the speed of the device. Despite the setback, Slat remains hopeful.
"What we're trying to do has never been done before. So, of course we were expecting to still need to fix a few things before it becomes fully operational," he told the AP.
The team's main goal is to remove 50 percent of the garbage patch within 5 years.
Slat shot to fame more than five years ago with his moonshot idea to clean up our plastic-filled seas. His plan inspired people around the world, and more than $40 million was raised ahead System 001's launch this summer, Wired reported.
The money went to years of research, development and prototyping. The team also conducted an aerial survey to map the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which counted an estimated 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic weighing 80,000 metric tons, the equivalent of 500 Jumbo Jets, currently afloat in the area.
Still, experts and other critics have consistently expressed doubts about the Ocean Cleanup concept. As EcoWatch previously mentioned, there's the fear that the system could harm fish or other bycatch. Also, the idea of a "patch" of garbage where debris floats on the surface of the water is a myth—plastics are found across the seafloor and vertically throughout the ocean.
Others have suggested that upstream designs (i.e. Baltimore Harbor's solar-powered trash wheel) and policy solutions such as bans on straws, grocery bags and other single-use products will better stem the flow of plastics before it reaches sea.
On Sunday's CBS' 60 Minutes, Denise Hardesty, a scientist with CSIRO's Oceans and Atmosphere, said she'd "love to be wrong" about the Ocean Cleanup, but she advised it's much smarter to place trash booms near city centers or install rubbish traps at rivers that feed out into the mouth of the ocean.
"You know, I think the analogy that you hear often is, 'If you've got a flood in the bathtub you're not gonna go just get a bunch of towels and try to keep cleaning it up, because it's still flooding over. You really need to turn off the tap, right?'" Hardesty told 60 Minutes correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi.
Alfonsi later asked Slat to respond to the skeptics.
He replied, "I think humanity can do more than one thing at the same time. And—you know—if your bathroom is over-flooding, I'm still pretty happy that the mop exists. Eventually we need to mop it up, right?"
Britain's Prince William interviewed famed broadcaster David Attenborough on Tuesday at the World Economic Forum's annual meeting in Switzerland.
During the sit-down, the 92-year-old naturalist advised the world leaders and business elite gathered in Davos this week that we must respect and protect the natural world, adding that the future of its survival—as well as humanity's survival—is in our hands.
Electric vehicle sales took off in 2018, with a record two million units sold around the world, according to a new Deloitte analysis.
What's more, the accounting firm predicts that another 21 million electric cars will be on the road globally over the next decade due to growing market demand for clean transportation, government subsidies, as well as bans on fossil fuel cars.
By Matthew Savoca
Plastic pollution in the world's oceans has become a global environmental crisis. Many people have seen images that seem to capture it, such as beaches carpeted with plastic trash or a seahorse gripping a cotton swab with its tail.
As a scientist researching marine plastic pollution, I thought I had seen a lot. Then, early in 2017, I heard from Alex Weber, a junior at Carmel High School in California.
Greenland is melting about four times faster than it was in 2003, a new study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found, a discovery with frightening implications for the pace and extent of future sea level rise.
"We're going to see faster and faster sea level rise for the foreseeable future," study lead author and Ohio State University geodynamics professor Dr. Michael Bevis said in a press release. "Once you hit that tipping point, the only question is: How severe does it get?"
Finally, some good news about the otherwise terrible partial government shutdown. A federal judge ruled that the Trump administration cannot issue permits to conduct seismic testing during the government impasse.
The Justice Department sought to delay—or stay—a motion filed by a range of coastal cities, businesses and conservation organizations that are suing the Trump administration over offshore oil drilling, Reuters reported. The department argued that it did not have the resources it needed to work on the case due to the shutdown.
Most people have heard of the Amazon, South America's famed rainforest and hub of biological diversity. Less well known, though no less critical, is the Pantanal, the world's largest tropical wetland.
Like the Amazon, the Pantanal is ecologically important and imperiled. Located primarily in Brazil, it also stretches into neighboring Bolivia and Paraguay. Covering an area larger than England at more than 70,000 square miles, the massive wetland provides irreplaceable ecosystem services that include the regulation of floodwaters, nutrient renewal, river flow for navigability, groundwater recharge and carbon sequestration. The wetland also supports the economies of the four South American states it covers.
By Andrea Germanos
Organizers said 35,000 people marched through the streets of the German capital on Saturday to say they're "fed up" with industrial agriculture and call for a transformation to a system that instead supports the welfare of the environment, animals and rural farmers.
EVs 101: Your Guide to Electric Vehicles
By Patrick Rogers
If you have ever considered making the switch to an environmentally friendly electric vehicle, don't drag your feet. Though EV prices are falling, and states are unveiling more and more public charging stations and plug-in-ready parking spots, the federal government is doing everything it can to slam the brakes on our progress away from gas-burning internal combustion engines. President Trump, likely pressured by his allies in the fossil fuel industry, has threatened to end the federal tax credits that have already helped put hundreds of thousands of EVs on the road—a move bound to harm not only our environment but our economy, too. After all, the manufacturing and sale of EVs, hybrids, and plug-in hybrids supported 197,000 jobs in 2017, according to the most recent U.S. Energy and Employment Report.