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Why cleaning the ocean isn’t effective

Written by

Morla Angelia

on

2 minute to read

The first question that probably comes to mind is: “Why don’t we just clean up the ocean?”

Well, cleaning up marine debris found in the open ocean is not as simple as it may sound. Take the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, for example. It alone spans 1.6 million square kilometers and contains 80,000 metric tonnes of plastic, which is around 1.8 trillion plastic pieces! While the task itself seems almost impossible already, the plastics are constantly shifting as a result of ocean currents and the majority of pieces are microplastics.

Moreover, efforts to clean the ocean aren’t actually solving the root cause of the problem. By focusing on ocean cleanup, we’re moving the proposed solution to a distant location, where the trash is, rather than into our own lives, where the trash is being generated. 

From the 31.9 million tonnes of mismanaged plastic waste near coastlines, under 0.4% of it ends up in surface waters, which is where ocean cleanup efforts are focused (under 0.4% of all plastic waste!!). So what about all of the rest of the plastic? If we could somehow clean our oceans, there’ll still be so much more that countries would have to deal with. It’ll be more worth it to intervene at an earlier stage in the process where we could have a higher impact on the problem! Right?

Additionally, the feasibility of cleaning our oceans is far too low. How could we even begin cleaning billions of pieces of tiny microplastics floating around in the water? Scientists estimate that if you tried to clean up  <1% of the North Pacific Ocean it would take one year for 67 ships to clean up that portion. 

The bottom line is that the patch will just keep on growing bigger. Until we prevent debris from entering the ocean at the source and, until we close the tap, it’ll be a vicious cycle that’ll grow worse and worse every year. And we are not only talking about the environmental impact. 

There’s still a whole other part of the problem that needs to be addressed: the human crisis aspect.

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