#A Plastic Ocean

[reasonsforhope]

““The Great Pacific Garbage Patch can now be cleaned,” announced Dutch entrepreneur Boyan Slat, the wonderkid inventor who’s spent a decade inventing systems for waterborne litter collection.

Recent tests on his Ocean Cleanup rig called System 002, invented to tackle the 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic pollution, were a success, leading Slat to predict that most of the oceanic garbage patches could be removed by 2040.

Intersections of ocean currents have created the massive floating islands of plastic trash—five slow-moving whirlpools that pull litter from thousands of miles away into a single radius.

The largest one sits between California and Hawaii, and 27-year-old Slat has been designing and testing his systems out there, launching from San Francisco since 2013.

GNN has reported on his original design for the floating device, but his engineering team improved upon it. System 002, nicknamed “Jenny,” successfully netted 9,000 kilograms, or around 20,000 pounds in its first trial.

It’s carbon-neutral, able to capture microplastics as small as 1 millimeter in diameter, and was designed to pose absolutely no threat to wildlife thanks to its wide capture area, slow motion, alerts, and camera monitors that allow operators to spy any overly-curious marine life...

Slat estimates ten Jennies could clean half the garbage patch in five years, and if 10 Jennies were deployed to the five major ocean gyres, then 90% of all floating plastic could be removed by 2040.” -via Good News Network, 10/19/21

[montereybayaquarium]

July Ocean Action recap

🌊Ready to make a splash?

Join Helen at the Kelp Forest exhibit as she shells out the latest ocean conservation stories!

And be shore to check out our Ocean Action email for conservation updates and ways you can kelp keep our seas serene! 🐠 Sign up today at mbayaq.co/oceanaction

[gender-trash]

when will i stop seeing posts of the genre "ah! you were supposed to automate away the BAD jobs, not the FUN CREATIVE ones! why not simply just [solve like 8 incredibly hard open problems in robotics] instead of [LLM thing]!"

like. sorry i apparently have to be the one to break this to you but the amount humans enjoy a task has basically zero correlation with how difficult it is to automate

[hellsitegenetics]

oh my gododdsijkwsasjcds hi h i hi hihihihihihi omg omg omg omg omg mogmo ogomgomgmogmomgomgomomgomgomgoovogmg im being insane in this asks on pourpose just to see what it spits out

String identified: gac g g g g g g ggggggggggg g a t a t t at t t t

Closest match: Aplysina aerophoba genome assembly, chromosome: 1 Common name: Gold sponge

[hope-for-the-planet]

The Ocean Cleanup, the only organization currently tackling the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (GPGP), has just reached a milestone of 200,000 kilograms, or 220 tons of plastic removed from the ocean.

In recent years, the Dutch non-profit completed the test run of their new system 002/B which can capture multiple tons of garbage in one sequence with its large booms measuring a mile and a half in length

The GPGP is not so much an island as it is an area where major currents and winds have brought together trillions of pieces of plastic.

By using the data of the currents and the winds to estimate volumes of plastic and to guide the capture vessels, Bojan Slat, the CEO and Founder of Ocean Cleanup, believes he can clean the whole patch in just a decade.

From Good News Network

[warandpeas]

We’ve All Got a Bit of Barbie in Us

Collab Comic with the wonderful people from Rewriting Extinction. Go check them out and support their cause.

[potatobugz]

greatest book ever btw. getting the audiobook was so worth it omg omg

[goosewizard]

“it’s so unbalanced” “I hate new developer soulslikes” “Easy baby game” (not true I got my ass beat) YES BUT WHAT ABOUT THE MESSAGE!!!!!! WHAT ABOUT THE SHUCKING MESSAGE!!!!! WHAT ABOUT JOY IN YOUR HEART AND FIGHTING FOR A WORLD THAT MAY NOT BE SALVAGEABLE BUT ITS YOURS!!!! WHAT ABOUT FRIENDSHIP AND ANTICSPITALISM!!! WHAT ABOUT GETTING SHUCKING ANGRY AND TEARING DOWN THE INSTITUTIONS THAT HARM YOU!! WHAT ABOUT SHOOTING YOUR ENEMIES WITH A GUN!!!!! WHAT ABOUT LESBIANISM!!!!

[catchymemes]

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[nwarrior777]

Why don't we have Cool Fat Robot Designs? Well now we have

Enough of dark anti utopias future prophesy, here is a leak from newspaper "Bright FutureNow Community News" from cool future. With article about, well, Cool Fat Robot

Core Lore aesthetic is Life combined with nature and technologies (yes it's post capitalism)

Can you participate in this thing - a very yes, that's the whole point, third page is literally tutorial of how to make your oc/MDreamerSona. Let's have fun!

[probablyasocialecologist]

In 2012, Dutch teenager Boyan Slat presented a TED Talk on his concept for cleaning up the ocean with simple mechanisms to sweep up all the trash. While scientists and plastics experts cautioned that his ideas were ineffective, Slat’s non-profit the Ocean Cleanup, founded the year after his talk went viral, has gained millions of followers and big-name backers, including Salesforce, Maersk, KIA, and PayPal’s Peter Thiel. But the venture had one major problem: its first two designs didn’t work, despite the group burning through tens of millions of dollars over the course of a decade. The Ocean Cleanup has since pivoted to work with upstream river “interceptors” that are much more efficient at capturing garbage, but its website still prominently features its latest ocean debris “solution”—essentially a trawl fishing net dragged between two boats that has, to date, collected a comparatively miniscule amount of trash. Tech projects like these are more of a curse than a blessing. Even if the Ocean Cleanup one day somehow beats the insurmountable odds and removes all surface-level traces of plastic marine pollution, it’d still be missing the vast majority of waste that sinks to the bottom of the ocean floor, or breaks up into tiny microplastics. While companies like these bring increased attention to the plastics crisis, they’re ultimately flashy gimmicks that lull our public consciousness into thinking a clever gadget can solve a collective-action problem. These projects also allow consumer brands—like Coca-Cola, an official “Global Implementation Partner” of Slat’s group—to greenwash their continued massive plastic production, while lobbying behind-the-scenes against regulations that would actually help the world break its plastic addiction.  “We now know that we can’t start to reduce plastic pollution without a reduction of production,” environmental scientists Imari Walker-Franklin and Jenna Jambeck write in the introduction to their forthcoming study, Plastics. To meaningfully address this crisis and others like it, we need to look upstream, invest in reuse infrastructure, and mandate biodegradable packaging and high material recyclability. At a minimum, we need to start making producers bear the cost for the collection and disposal of their poorly designed goods.

[reasonsforhope]

"For generations, the people of Erakor village in the Pacific nation of Vanuatu would pass their time swimming in the local lagoon. Ken Andrew, a local chief, remembers diving in its depths when he was a child, chasing the fish that spawned in its turquoise waters.

That was decades ago. Now 52, Andrew has noticed a more pernicious entity invading the lagoon: plastic.

“The plastic would form a small island inside the lagoon, it was so thick,” Andrew says. “We used fishing nets to pull some of the trash out, but we didn’t know how to get rid of it all. We couldn’t conquer it, there was just too much.”

While residents were struggling to empty Vanuatu’s waters of plastic, the country’s politicians were considering another solution. Could they stop the waste directly at the source?

Small island nations like Vanuatu face a series of unique challenges when it comes to plastic pollution. Many rely on imported goods to sustain their populations, and receive tonnes of plastic packaging every day as a result. Ocean currents pull plastic waste from around the world into Pacific waters, which eventually end up on the shores of its islands.

Few Pacific island governments have adequate recycling or waste management facilities on their narrow strips of land, so rubbish is often burned or left to wash up in rivers or lagoons like the one in Erakor. It is estimated that Pacific countries generate 1kg of waste per person a day, 40% higher than the global average.

In an attempt to drastically limit the amount of waste generated in Vanuatu, in 2018 the government became one of the first in the world to outlaw the sale and distribution of certain single-use plastics – including a world-first ban on plastic straws.

In the six years since, the results have been impressive. Thin, plastic shopping bags are hardly ever seen, with most shoppers carrying reusable bags at their local market or grocery store. At festivals and outdoor events, food is more often served wrapped in banana leaves instead of polystyrene takeaway boxes. Now-banned items used to make up 35% of Vanuatu’s waste, but now make up less than 2%.

Pictured: Pandanus leaves are now used instead of plastic bags at markets, but supply of the crop can be affected by storms and cyclones, vendors say.

The plastic islands that once choked Erakor lagoon are also shrinking.

“Since they started the ban, you can see the lagoon has become cleaner,” says Andrew.

It is a massive victory for a small island nation made up of just over 300,000 people across 83 islands...

In 2020, a second phase of the policy added seven more items to the list of forbidden plastics, which now covers cutlery, single-use plates and artificial flowers.

“It’s quite difficult to enforce because of the very low capacity of the department of environment,” Regenvanu says. “So we try to work with the municipal authorities and customs and other people as well.”

Compromises had to be made, though. Fishers are still allowed to use plastic to wrap and transport their produce. Plastic bottles are also permitted, even though they often litter coastlines and rivers.

Secondary industries have now developed to provide sustainable alternatives to the banned items. On the island of Pentecost, communities have started replacing plastic planter pots with biodegradable ones made from native pandanus leaves. Mama’s Laef, a social enterprise that began selling fabric sanitary napkins before the ban, has since expanded its range to reusable nappies and bags.

“We came up with these ideas to reduce the amount of plastic in Vanuatu,” says the owner Jack Kalsrap. “We’re a small island state, so we know that pollution can really overwhelm us more than in other, bigger countries.” ...

Willy Sylverio, a coordinator of the Erakor Bridge Youth Association, is trying to find ways to recycle the litter his team regularly dredges up from the lagoon.

“The majority of the plastic waste now comes from noodle packaging or rice packaging, or biscuit packets,” Sylverio says. He hopes the plastic ban will one day include all packaging that covers imported goods. “Banning all plastic is a great idea, because it blocks the main road through which our environment is polluted.”

The Vanuatu government plans to expand the plastic ban to include disposable nappies, and says it will also introduce a plastic bottle deposit scheme this year to help recycle the remaining plastic waste in the country."

-via The Guardian, June 20, 2024

[montereybayaquarium]

Happy Earth Month! What better way to sea-lebrate than diving into ocean conservation news and taking action?

Join forces with us and other aquariums to urge U.S. leaders to take bold action on plastic. https://mbayaq.co/sign    And don’t forget to sign up for our quarterly Ocean Action Newsletter for the latest updates and ways that you can help protect the ocean 💙🌎 https://mbayaq.co/oceanaction

[anchored-nyctophilia]

yes yes the agony of heartbreak, the anguish of unrequited love is all good and fine, but have you ever overshot a titration?

[todropscience]

NORTH PACIFIC GYRE NOW WORKS AS A ISLAND, WHERE COASTAL SPECIES CAN THRIVE

Researchers have recently prove that the high seas are colonized by a diverse array of coastal species, which survive and reproduce in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a collection of floating marine debris in the North Pacific Ocean, in the open ocean.

Researchers examined 105 items of floating plastic items collected from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and identified 484 marine invertebrate organisms on the debris, accounting for 46 different species, of which 37 coastal were invertebrate species from coastal habitats, largely of Western Pacific origin. Most of these coastal species possessed either direct development or asexual reproduction, possibly facilitating long-term persistence on rafts. 

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is so huge that the findings suggest plastic pollution in the ocean might be enabling the creation of new floating ecosystems of species that are not normally able to survive in the open ocean. 

These emergent properties of plastic rafts may play an important role in sustaining diverse biofouling communities, but more research is needed to understand how such emergent properties may drive colonization, succession and trophic interactions of coastal and pelagic taxa associated with floating plastics.

Photo above: Floating plastic debris from the  the Eastern North Pacific Subtropical Gyre showing coastal organism living on. Photos courtesy of The Ocean Cleanup.

Photo below: Graphic  of the debris collection sites, illustrated as diamonds, in the Eastern North Pacific Ocean Subtropical Gyre. Model of the predicted concentration of debris, the more red, the most you could find marine debris.

Reference (Open Access): Haram et al. 2023 Extent and reproduction of coastal species on plastic debris in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre. Nat Ecol Evol

[melyzard]

*article is dated 25 Dec 2023

*article is dated 29 Dec 2023 (and no, it's not the same method as the article above)

https://www.surfer.com/culture/17-million-pounds-trash-removed-ocean-cleanup