February 11, 2025 – Ambitious Plan to Rid the Great Pacific Garbage Patch Faces Hurdles
Plastic products have undeniably revolutionized daily life, but they have also posed increasingly severe environmental challenges. Globally, plastic recycling rates hover around a mere 15%, leading to tens of millions of tons of plastic waste entering oceans annually. The contaminated area has expanded to millions of square kilometers.
Recently, an environmental organization announced an ambitious plan to completely eradicate the Great Pacific Garbage Patch within the next decade and utilize the recovered plastic waste in the manufacturing of automobile parts. However, as research progresses, the complexity and challenges of this plan have gradually come to light. Scientists caution that tackling marine plastic pollution is far more intricate than anticipated, and cleanup efforts alone may not provide a fundamental solution.
According to Color Masterbatch Industry News, about two and a half years ago, the environmental organization Ocean Cleanup successfully tested its System 003 in the North Pacific, removing 18 tons of marine debris in a single operation, setting a new record for human-led marine cleanup efforts. Since its inception in 2012, the organization has been dedicated to sweeping up marine debris using trawling operations. After six years of technical testing, research, and improvements, they now state they are ready to undertake a planned cleanup of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an ambitious project estimated to cost $7.5 billion.
Nonetheless, marine scientists approach this plan with caution. They believe that mechanized cleanup of marine plastic debris could be futile and may even pose potential ecological risks. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, spanning 1.6 million square kilometers between Hawaii and California, is the largest accumulation of marine debris in the world, estimated to contain approximately 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic. Oceanographers became aware of plastic waste aggregating into “garbage islands” as early as the 1970s. In 1997, American captain Charles Moore first discovered this plastic-laden sea area during a voyage, where various plastic debris, from bleach bottles to television parts, were ubiquitous.
It’s worth noting that the Eastern Pacific Garbage Patch is just part of the Pacific trash system, which also includes the Western Pacific Garbage Patch near the coast of Japan and a subtropical convergence zone that transports debris between the two. Similar garbage patches exist in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. A 2018 study by an international research team found that the amount of plastic floating in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch was at least 79,000 tons, a figure 4 to 16 times higher than previous estimates.