Garbage much worse...

Garbage ‘patch’ is much worse than believed, entrepreneur says

By Jaxon Van Derbeken

It is known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch — a mass of plastic floating debris estimated to be twice the size of Texas and concentrated between California and Hawaii.

But to Boyan Slat, the 21-year-old Dutch entrepreneur who is orchestrating what he envisions as the largest ocean cleanup effort in history, “patch” is far too gentle a term. He prefers “ticking time bomb.”

On Sunday, the seasick-prone Slat watched safely from on shore as the 170-foot mother ship of the 30-vessel “mega expedition” docked in San Francisco with its haul of several tons of plastic debris.

The haul ranged from tiny colored shards to toothbrushes and toy plastic army solders up in size to discarded buoys and even huge abandoned “ghost” fishing nets.

The urgency to launch a cleanup, Slat says, is that sunlight, together with legions of tiny hydrocarbon consuming organisms, can turn large chunks of plastic into a “plastic soup” of little bits, virtually impossible to retrieve.

“If we don’t clean it up soon, then we will give the big plastic the time to break down into smaller and smaller pieces,” he said at a news conference showing off the finds. “Based on what we’ve seen out there, the only way to describe the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a ticking time bomb.”

Meanwhile, every week, enough garbage to fill the Empire State Building twice flows into the ocean. Much of it comes from the land, but at least a fifth of it is dumped at sea by fishermen, he said.

There was some good news from the voyage — about 80 percent of the larger plastic that was found had yet to break down as feared. The bad news, Slat said, is the measured volume dwarfs the sporadic estimates made since the debris field was first discovered in 1997.

Slat began his seemingly impossible cleanup quest at 16, when he was diving off Greece and saw more plastic bags than fish in the waters of the Mediterranean.

“I was wondering, why can’t we just clean this up? Why isn’t anyone working on this?”

He later dropped out of college. He has won international recognition for his environmental cleanup efforts, notably his novel approach that would cut costs and allow a rapid solution to the problem. It involves deploying an array of floating barriers anchored to the sea floor, which would extend in a V-shape 30 miles in both directions to use the ocean current to drive the debris to the center. The plan is expected to be tested in Japanese waters next year.

Slat cited a recent feasibility study showing half the patch could be cleaned in just 10 years. The survey expedition, he said, is the first step in an effort he hopes will begin in 2020.

So far, Slat has raised $2.2 million in crowdfunding through some 38,000 donors. The effort is also backed by Salesforce.com founder Marc Benioff.

On Sunday, the lead oceanographer of the effort, aquatic pollution researcher Julia Reisser, showed off just a tiny sample of the debris captured from 80 sample locations in the patch.

“The trawls we did found little marine life, but lots and lots of plastic,” she said. “I would say that we had hundreds of times more plastics than organisms on our catch.”

Reisser said she thinks the haul will mean she will have to rethink her old estimate of 250,000 tons on the patch.

“Very likely the research we are doing here is going to increase the current estimation of the total load of plastics,” she said. “We haven’t weighed the plastic. We found far much more, perhaps an order of magnitude more.”

Much of it has been kept frozen in giant storage units and freezers on board the Ocean Starr during its voyage back to land. The reason for the freezing was evident as researchers showed off the plastic tubs containing samples of the flotsam: the stench.

“If things start rotting, the customs won’t let it through anymore,” Slat said. “It’s a practical consideration.”