A commendable operation but sadly, this is a very small fraction of a percentage of the 8-10 million tons of plastic entering the ocean each year.<p>The Ocean Cleanup themselves have estimated at least 75% of ocean trash is from fishing boats, and from living on a remote tropical island myself, at least 90% of the things you find washed up on the beach appear to be from Chinese fishing vessels. (there's usually Chinese characters on the bottles and plastic)<p>Imagine how much more cost effective it would be for these NGO's to lobby (bribe) politicians and the UN to require all fishing vessels to bring back their trash to port to be weighed and processed, their nets counted.<p>They say theres about 10 rivers in the world that contribute the remainder of the ocean plastic, so if they can put these recovery systems on those next then we're half way towards solving the problem
Credit to this organization from pivoting (AFAIK) from their original plan to scrape the plastic out of the water on the open ocean ("System 001"). Intercepting plastic at river mouths seems much more practical and cost effective.
I LOVE this company. We need more of them. Innovative, Solving world problems. Aware of their impact.<p>I am always encouraging people to donate. These are the kinds of projects that might save us.<p>I wish YC, and it's kin, would fund companies like this.
I'm curious how much effort is being put into avoiding this trash ending up in the rivers in the first place. Obviously it's important to catch it before it gets in the ocean, but if people are just dumping directly into the river far upstream, this feels like a Sisyphian task
Why can’t we just start charging producers of waste a direct cost. If we charged producers (McDonald’s, coke, Pepsi, supermarket, uniliver etc) $1 for every plastic bottle they used, we’d have a budget for clean up and a change in motivations. Suddenly glass reuse programs are suddenly cost comparable etc
Thank god! An example of human ingenuity going to clean up our human impact on the natural world INSTEAD of YAStory of boiling the ocean to generate the perfect cat meme.
I don't understand why people (Greenpeace) are so against The Ocean Cleanup - complaining that we need to fix the problem at the root instead of cleaning up the mess afterwards. Why can't we do both?
See here for a 2019 New Yorker profile of the project and of Boyan: <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/02/04/a-grand-plan-to-clean-the-great-pacific-garbage-patch" rel="nofollow">https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/02/04/a-grand-plan-t...</a><p>Glad to see them still in action!
i'm curious about the split between capital versus philanthropic funding for an operation like this.<p>i feel certain that this relatively new (sub?)industry—waterway/ocean waste management—is here to stay for a very long time. but i struggle to see how it could ever turn a profit, unless and until they're able to generate revenue/s from the waste they're retrieving. it all feels like a fascinatingly super long play.
Great interview with Boyan Slat on AO:
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNWiqq0UxN0" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNWiqq0UxN0</a>
Inspiring stuff. I love to donate to orgs like this in lieu of giving gifts to people who have the resources and inclination to buy anything they want already.
It looks like in the absence of functional trash hauling and landfill service people just use river for both.<p>Looks terrible but if you catch the trash in the end and burn it or landfill it nearby it becomes a kind of replacement for network of diesel trucks running around each day collecting trash.
more on its wikipedia page (there's one in Los Angeles too)<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ocean_Cleanup" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ocean_Cleanup</a>
Possibly dumb question. Where does all this collected trash go?<p>I see on their FAQ that they try to recycle the plastics, but they catch a lot more than plastics.
This is the kind of effort that money should be directed towards. Not the ad infested crap on eyeballs.<p>The ROI is literally cleaner environment. If there was only a way to tax proportional to emissions producers.
The 'plastic problem' seems like it could be easily solved with a weight-based deposit system. Start paying people $1/lb for plastic rubbish and you won't be able to find any laying around. Plastic isn't very dense, so you might need to up the price per lb, but paying people for their waste means municipalities don't have to send people around to collect it in the first place and you don't have to fund cleanup efforts.