The rest is burned, buried, or ends up in the environment, including the sea. Between 20, plastic production worldwide doubled, reaching 460 million metric tons - and only a small fraction of that gets recycled. But the whole squabble raises a bigger question about cleaning up plastic in the open ocean: Is it even a good idea to begin with?Įveryone can agree that plastic waste is a scourge. On its face, The Ocean Cleanup’s approach to solving one of the hardest environmental problems appears to be a worthy one. The Ocean Cleanup empties a net full of plastic from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch on the deck of a ship. In response to those allegations, The Ocean Cleanup explained that water in the garbage patch lacks nutrients that marine life needs to grow and shared other reasons why the plastic looked so clean (which some biologists again rebuffed). There should have been a more visible build-up of marine organisms like algae and barnacles. On Twitter and in media reports, they said that the plastic looked too clean to have been floating for a while in the ocean. Richards and several other marine biologists quickly challenged the group’s claim. The Ocean Cleanup, which has raised more than $100 million on the promise to rid plastic from the seas, said the trash in the video was just pulled from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch - an infamous region in international waters, between California and Hawaii, that’s polluted with plastic waste. In the 25-second clip, a large net appears to dump 8,400 pounds of plastic waste, including crates, buckets, and fishing gear, onto the deck of a ship. “This is likely a staged video,” Clark Richards, a scientist at the Bedford Institute of Oceanography, wrote. Last month, a group of marine biologists noticed something fishy in a video posted on Twitter by a nonprofit called The Ocean Cleanup.
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