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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?"
- How Boyan Slat's The Ocean Cleanup Was Derailed By A Flawed ... ›
- Boyan Slat (@BoyanSlat) | Twitter ›
- The Ocean Cleanup ›
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By Jennifer Molidor
One million species are at risk of extinction from human activity, warns a recent study by scientists with the United Nations. We need to cut greenhouse gas pollution across all sectors to avoid catastrophic climate change — and we need to do it fast, said the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
This research should serve as a rallying cry for polluting industries to make major changes now. Yet the agriculture industry continues to lag behind.
Botswana, home to one third of Africa's elephants, announced Wednesday that it was lifting its ban on the hunting of the large mammals.
"The Ministry of Environment, Natural Resources Conservation and Tourism wishes to inform the public that following extensive consultations with all stakeholders, the Government of Botswana has taken a decision to lift the hunting suspension," the government announced in a press release shared on social media.
Company Safety Data Sheets on New Chemicals Frequently Lack the Worker Protections EPA Claims They Include
By Richard Denison
Readers of this blog know how concerned EDF is over the Trump EPA's approval of many dozens of new chemicals based on its mere "expectation" that workers across supply chains will always employ personal protective equipment (PPE) just because it is recommended in the manufacturer's non-binding safety data sheet (SDS).
By Grant Smith
From 2009 to 2012, Gregory Jaczko was chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which approves nuclear power plant designs and sets safety standards for plants. But he now says that nuclear power is too dangerous and expensive — and not part of the answer to the climate crisis.
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‘It’s Raining Plastic’: Researchers Find Microscopic Fibers in Colorado Rain Samples
By Brett Walton
When Greg Wetherbee sat in front of the microscope recently, he was looking for fragments of metals or coal, particles that might indicate the source of airborne nitrogen pollution in Rocky Mountain National Park. What caught his eye, though, were the plastics.
In a big victory for animals, Prada has announced that it's ending its use of fur! It joins Coach, Jean Paul Gaultier, Giorgio Armani, Versace, Ralph Lauren, Vivienne Westwood, Michael Kors, Donna Karan and many others PETA has pushed toward a ban.
This is a victory more than a decade in the making. PETA and our international affiliates have crashed Prada's catwalks with anti-fur signs, held eye-catching demonstrations all around the world, and sent the company loads of information about the fur industry. In 2018, actor and animal rights advocate Pamela Anderson sent a letter on PETA's behalf urging Miuccia Prada to commit to leaving fur out of all future collections, and the iconic designer has finally listened.
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If people in three European countries want to fight the climate crisis, they need to chill out more.
That's the conclusion of a new study from think tank Autonomy, which found that Germany, the UK and Sweden all needed to drastically reduce their workweeks to fight climate change.
"The rapid pace of labour-saving technology brings into focus the possibility of a shorter working week for all, if deployed properly," Autonomy Director Will Stronge said, The Guardian reported. "However, while automation shows that less work is technically possible, the urgent pressures on the environment and on our available carbon budget show that reducing the working week is in fact necessary."
The report found that if the economies of Germany, Sweden and the UK maintain their current levels of carbon intensity and productivity, they would need to switch to a six, 12 and nine hour work week respectively if they wanted keep the rise in global temperatures to the below two degrees Celsius promised by the Paris agreement, The Independent reported.
The study based its conclusions on data from the UN and the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) on greenhouse gas emissions per industry in all three countries.
The report comes as the group Momentum called on the UK's Labour Party to endorse a four-day work week.
"We welcome this attempt by Autonomy to grapple with the very real changes society will need to make in order to live within the limits of the planet," Emma Williams of the Four Day Week campaign said in a statement reported by The Independent. "In addition to improved well-being, enhanced gender equality and increased productivity, addressing climate change is another compelling reason we should all be working less."
Supporters of the idea linked it to calls in the U.S. and Europe for a Green New Deal that would decarbonize the economy while promoting equality and well-being.
"This new paper from Autonomy is a thought experiment that should give policymakers, activists and campaigners more ballast to make the case that a Green New Deal is absolutely necessary," Common Wealth think tank Director Mat Lawrence told The Independent. "The link between working time and GHG (greenhouse gas) emissions has been proved by a number of studies. Using OECD data and relating it to our carbon budget, Autonomy have taken the step to show what that link means in terms of our working weeks."
Stronge also linked his report to calls for a Green New Deal.
"Becoming a green, sustainable society will require a number of strategies – a shorter working week being just one of them," he said, according to The Guardian. "This paper and the other nascent research in the field should give us plenty of food for thought when we consider how urgent a Green New Deal is and what it should look like."
- Reduced Work Hours as a Means of Slowing Climate Change ›
- How working less could solve all our problems. Really. | ›
- Needed: A shorter work week – People's World ›
Amazon shareholders voted down an employee-backed resolution calling for more aggressive action on climate change at their annual meeting Wednesday, The Los Angeles Times reported.