Most Ocean Plastic Flows From Rivers. Can Giant Trash Barriers Stop It? | World Wide Waste
Summary
TLDRThe video highlights Boyan Slat's initiative, The Ocean Cleanup, aimed at tackling ocean plastic pollution. Initially focused on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the nonprofit has shifted efforts toward rivers, which are the main sources of ocean plastics. Using solar-powered Interceptors, they capture trash before it reaches the sea. The video also touches on the environmental challenges, criticisms, and limitations of the project, while showcasing successful partnerships in places like the Dominican Republic and Guatemala. It emphasizes the need for broader systemic change to reduce plastic production and pollution.
Takeaways
- 🌊 Boyan Slat started The Ocean Cleanup with the goal of removing plastic from oceans using U-shaped barriers.
- 🚮 The original timeline for cleaning the Great Pacific Garbage Patch was overly optimistic, but 200 metric tons of trash have been removed from the Pacific.
- 🌎 Rivers are the main sources of ocean plastic, so The Ocean Cleanup focuses on cleaning rivers with machines called Interceptors.
- 🛠️ Interceptors, which are 700-foot-long trash barriers, capture waste from rivers and divert it to collection machines.
- 💧 The Rio Ozama in the Dominican Republic is one of the most polluted rivers and has an Interceptor installed to clean it.
- 🌱 Invasive water hyacinths, which thrive in polluted rivers, are being removed as part of the cleanup efforts.
- 🚚 Local communities often struggle with waste management due to poor infrastructure, contributing to river pollution.
- 🇩🇴 The Dominican Navy partners with The Ocean Cleanup to operate Interceptors and manually collect trash that escapes.
- ⚠️ Concerns exist about the Interceptors disrupting river ecosystems, but efforts are made to minimize harm.
- 🌍 Boyan Slat’s vision now includes adapting solutions for different river conditions globally.
Q & A
Who is Boyan Slat and what was his initial idea for cleaning the ocean?
-Boyan Slat is a Dutch entrepreneur who, in 2012, proposed an ambitious plan to eliminate plastic in the ocean by harnessing natural currents to collect debris using a U-shaped barrier.
How much plastic has The Ocean Cleanup removed from the Pacific Ocean so far?
-The Ocean Cleanup has removed over 200 metric tons of trash from the Pacific Ocean, though it's only a small fraction of the total plastic present.
What are Interceptors, and what is their purpose?
-Interceptors are machines developed by The Ocean Cleanup to capture waste from rivers before it reaches the ocean. These machines are designed to prevent plastic from entering open waters.
Why are rivers a critical focus for The Ocean Cleanup's efforts?
-Rivers are crucial because they act as arteries, carrying large amounts of plastic from land to sea. By targeting rivers, The Ocean Cleanup aims to stop plastic pollution at its source.
What challenges do the Interceptors face in rivers like the Rio Ozama in the Dominican Republic?
-The Rio Ozama carries up to 22,000 metric tons of plastic into the Caribbean Sea annually, and while Interceptors help capture waste, residents often have limited trash disposal options, leading to continued pollution.
How does The Ocean Cleanup address the unique needs of different rivers?
-The Ocean Cleanup adapts its Interceptors to the specific conditions of each river. For example, in Guatemala’s Rio Motagua, they built an Interceptor fence to handle the massive amounts of trash flowing down the river during flash floods.
What environmental concerns do some experts have about the use of Interceptors and ocean cleanup devices?
-Some experts worry that these machines might disrupt ecosystems by capturing living organisms alongside plastic. Although The Ocean Cleanup tries to reduce this impact, it’s impossible to avoid capturing some marine life.
What alternative methods are suggested for cleaning the ocean besides sweeping entire gyres?
-Some researchers suggest targeting clusters of plastic, like 'plastic dust bunnies,' which are easier to collect and often contain more harmful debris, such as ghost fishing gear.
How does The Ocean Cleanup's river system compare to its ocean cleanup efforts?
-The Ocean Cleanup has collected over 10 times more plastic from rivers than from the ocean. This highlights the efficiency of targeting rivers to prevent plastic from reaching the sea in the first place.
What personal efforts does Carmen Encarnacion, a resident near the Rio Ozama, make to combat pollution in her community?
-Carmen collects invasive water hyacinths, which are harmful to the river's ecosystem, and transforms them into useful items like hats and bags. She plays an active role in her neighborhood’s efforts to clean the environment.
Outlines
🌊 Boyan Slat's Ocean Cleanup Ambition
In 2012, Boyan Slat, a teenager, introduced an ambitious idea to clean the ocean by harnessing natural currents with a U-shaped barrier to collect plastic. Although the initial timeline for cleaning the Great Pacific Garbage Patch didn't pan out, Slat's nonprofit, The Ocean Cleanup, has made strides by removing over 200 metric tons of trash. Despite early skepticism, the organization now aims to tackle pollution closer to its source: rivers, where most ocean plastic originates.
🚢 Interceptors and Cleaning River Plastic
To prevent plastic from reaching oceans, The Ocean Cleanup deploys machines called Interceptors in polluted rivers. These machines are designed to capture floating waste and have been deployed globally, including in the Dominican Republic’s Rio Ozama. However, experts express concern that these devices could strip rivers of important natural elements. Despite the progress, plastic pollution remains a significant challenge due to the sheer volume of waste flowing through rivers.
🏞 River Ecosystem and Local Impact
The Rio Ozama, one of the world's dirtiest rivers, has become a key focus for The Ocean Cleanup. Residents, like Carmen Encarnacion, live near the river and depend on it for drinking water. While an Interceptor was installed, poor waste management systems force locals to dump trash directly into drainage systems, which end up in the river. Despite this, The Ocean Cleanup is working closely with local partners like the Dominican Navy to manage and maintain the river cleaner.
🌿 Tackling Invasive Species and Pollution
The Ozama River not only carries trash but is also overrun by invasive water hyacinths. These plants, introduced from the Amazon, thrive in polluted waters and contribute to the ecosystem's degradation. The Ocean Cleanup's Interceptors also collect these plants, which are harmful due to their rapid growth and ability to block light and oxygen in the water. This underlines the complex nature of river pollution, which includes both plastic waste and invasive species.
🌊 Cleaning the Great Pacific Garbage Patch
The Ocean Cleanup continues its efforts to address plastic in the open ocean, focusing on the North Pacific Gyre, part of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Using a system of barriers, the nonprofit aims to consolidate and collect plastic. Although they've removed over 200 metric tons of plastic, this only accounts for a small fraction of the total debris. The organization is working on scaling up their system to clean larger areas more efficiently, but challenges remain, including the disruption of marine life.
🐠 Ecosystem Concerns and Plastic Dust Bunnies
Critics of ocean cleanup efforts argue that once plastic is in the ocean, it becomes intertwined with marine life. Removing it can harm sea creatures that use the debris as shelter or breeding grounds. Researchers suggest focusing on concentrated clusters of plastic, such as discarded fishing gear, which is particularly harmful to marine life. By targeting these areas, the most dangerous plastics can be removed without disrupting ecosystems.
🏭 The Importance of Preventing Plastic Pollution
The Ocean Cleanup has made greater progress in cleaning rivers compared to oceans, but the issue of plastic pollution persists. Without proper waste management systems, rivers like the Ozama will continue to carry trash into the sea. Boyan Slat acknowledges that while landfill isn't an ideal solution, it's preferable to letting the plastic reach the ocean. The organization works with local governments and partners to improve waste disposal methods and restore polluted ecosystems.
👩🎨 Local Efforts and Community Engagement
Community members, like Carmen, play a role in addressing local pollution. She collects invasive water hyacinths and repurposes them into items such as hats and bags, turning a harmful plant into something useful. However, despite these efforts, she and others recognize the need for larger-scale solutions to remove plastic and invasive species from rivers and oceans for good.
Mindmap
Keywords
💡Boyan Slat
💡The Great Pacific Garbage Patch
💡Interceptor
💡River pollution
💡Water hyacinths
💡Rio Ozama
💡Gyres
💡Ghost gear
💡Plastic clumps
💡Plastic-free ocean
Highlights
In 2012, a teenager, Boyan Slat, envisioned an ambitious plan to eliminate plastic from the ocean using natural currents and a U-shaped barrier.
The Ocean Cleanup, founded by Boyan Slat, has removed more than 200 metric tons of trash from the Pacific.
Boyan Slat's original timeline to clean the Great Pacific Garbage Patch within five years did not work out, but progress has been made.
Most ocean plastic comes from rivers, leading to the invention of Interceptors, machines designed to capture plastic waste in rivers before it reaches open waters.
The Ocean Cleanup installed an Interceptor in the Rio Ozama, one of the world's most polluted rivers, to capture floating debris.
Interceptor machines allow water to pass while stopping floating trash, with conveyor belts carrying the waste into dumpsters.
Many of the plants collected by the Interceptor in the Rio Ozama are invasive water hyacinths, which thrive in polluted waters and contribute to ecological imbalances.
Nearby communities along the Rio Ozama lack proper urban planning and trash collection infrastructure, contributing to river pollution.
The Ocean Cleanup is working with local partners like the Dominican Navy to handle day-to-day operations and trash collection from the Rio Ozama.
The organization has plans to expand its river cleanup operations, targeting highly polluted rivers like the Rio Motagua in Guatemala.
The Ocean Cleanup is fine-tuning its systems to better capture plastic while minimizing harm to marine life, as its systems currently capture some fish and other creatures.
Critics suggest focusing on removing the most harmful ocean plastics, like ghost fishing gear, which poses significant threats to marine life.
Plastic in the open ocean forms 'plastic dust bunnies,' making targeted removal of concentrated clusters more efficient than sweeping large areas.
As of April 2023, The Ocean Cleanup has removed over 10 times more plastic from rivers than from oceans.
While not ideal, sending river plastic to landfills is seen as a better alternative than allowing it to continue polluting the oceans.
Transcripts
Narrator: In 2012,
a teenager came up with an ambitious plan
to eliminate plastic in the ocean.
Boyan Slat wanted to harness natural currents
to collect floating debris inside a giant U-shaped barrier.
I believe the Great Pacific Garbage Patch
can completely clean itself
in just five years.
Narrator: That timeline didn't work out,
and there's still a garbage truck's worth of plastic
entering the ocean every minute on average.
But The Ocean Cleanup has made progress.
The nonprofit has removed more than 200 metric tons
of trash from the Pacific.
Many people said that it couldn't be done,
that it was a fool's errand, a pipe dream.
Narrator: But to really make a dent in plastic pollution,
the organization's going closer to the source.
Most ocean plastic comes from rivers,
so the Dutch entrepreneur invented these big machines
that capture waste before it ever makes it to open waters.
Rivers are the arteries
that carry the trash from land to sea.
Narrator: They're called Interceptors,
and the founder plans to deploy 1,000 of them.
But some experts worry
these machines could strip rivers and oceans
of things that are supposed to be there, too.
So can a network of trash barriers
clean the world's most polluted rivers?
And are cleaner rivers the key to a plastic-free ocean?
The Rio Ozama in the Dominican Republic
flows into the Caribbean Sea.
It's one of the dirtiest rivers in the world,
and Carmen Encarnacion has lived nearby for 24 years.
Narrator: The Ocean Cleanup installed an Interceptor
about a mile down the river from her home in 2020.
Narrator: The idea is to let the current
do most of the work.
As trash travels downstream,
this 700-foot-long arm redirects it
toward the machine's opening.
Boyan: So what the barriers do is they let the water pass,
but they stop everything that's floating.
On the roof, we have these solar panels
that are connected to batteries, which store the energy,
so that even at night we can keep intercepting plastic.
Narrator: Conveyor belts carry the waste
to one of six dumpsters.
They can fill up in just three days during the rainy season.
A lot of today's haul is plants.
And in this case, that's probably not a bad thing.
These are invasive water hyacinths.
They grow naturally in the Amazon,
but over the past century,
humans have introduced them to new places
where they don't have any predators,
like the Ozama River, where they're taking over,
blocking light and oxygen
and killing plants and animals beneath them.
The plant tends to thrive in polluted water,
and its roots cling to trash.
Narrator: Nearby factories and farms have used this river
as a dumping ground for decades.
But in Santo Domingo,
many people who live on the Ozama's banks
depend on it for drinking water.
A lot of them also have limited options
for dealing with waste.
Erik: It has to do with urban planning,
and these communities here
don't have the access roads for the trucks to come in.
Narrator: So some locals dump their trash
and drainage ditches called cañadas.
So right behind me, we have the Cañada Bonavides.
It's one of the worst cañadas
we have here in the Ozama River.
Just like the rivers are the arteries
that take the plastic to the ocean,
these cañadas here are the arteries
that take the plastic to the river.
Narrator: The Ocean Cleanup estimates the Ozama carries
up to 22,000 metric tons of plastic
into the Caribbean Sea each year.
The nonprofit has 10 other Interceptors
in rivers around the globe.
The devices can't remove all types of pollution,
like chemicals, or plastic that doesn't float.
And until residents have more options
for dealing with trash,
it'll keep ending up in the Ozama.
Erik: We rely heavily on working with local partners,
such as the Dominican navy here, or the UNDP,
precisely to work on this upstream problem.
Narrator: The Navy handles day-to-day operations
for the river cleaner,
and it works with the national government
to manually collect trash that slips by the Interceptor.
Erik: They have proven to be the perfect partners for us,
and by the end of the year,
they should be owning the Interceptor.
Narrator: Once that happens,
The Ocean Cleanup will shift its focus to other rivers,
like the Rio Motagua in Guatemala,
which the nonprofit says might have more plastic
than any other in the world.
Boyan: In Guatemala,
there's so much trash coming down the river
that these machines would be filled within a few seconds.
So there, again, we have a different type of Interceptor.
Narrator: The nonprofit built an Interceptor fence
to catch plastic in a flash-flood zone
that flows into the river.
Boyan: Every river is unique.
You really need to adapt it
to the specific circumstances of that river.
Narrator: The fence lets some plastics through,
but Boyan expects to have an updated Interceptor
by the end of 2023.
Meanwhile, the founder hasn't given up on his initial dream:
cleaning the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
He founded The Ocean Cleanup in 2013,
and a decade later, the patch is still growing.
One challenge is that it isn't really a patch.
It's actually two swirling clouds of debris,
which often aren't visible on the surface.
Natural currents have created
five whirlpools like it around the world, called gyres,
and each one collects trash.
The nonprofit is working on cleaning up
the North Pacific Gyre using this thing.
It's a flexible barrier stretched between two ships
with a shallow screen hanging off.
The idea is to consolidate floating plastic,
making it easier to collect about once a week.
The Ocean Cleanup says in total,
it's removed more than 200 metric tons of plastic
from the Pacific Gyre.
Yet, it's only about two-tenths of a percent
of all the plastic that might be floating here.
The team is working on a system
three times bigger than this one,
which should be ready sometime in 2023.
Some researchers worry
these cleaning machines can disrupt ecosystems
by scooping up living things along with trash.
The Ocean Cleanup says the screen creates a downward flow
that carries living creatures under it.
But the system still catches some fish,
crabs, barnacles, and other animals.
The nonprofit says it's continually fine-tuning the device
to try to keep creatures out,
but it's impossible to avoid them completely.
That's partially because sea life
is all mixed up with the plastic
and can even live right on it.
Martin: Sea urchins,
sea stars,
pretty much anything that you can imagine,
you can also find on these plastic flows.
There's a lot of organisms that also attach their eggs
to these floating plastics.
Narrator: Some critics say the whole idea
of passively harvesting plastic is risky.
Martin: Once it is in the ocean,
it is connected
with marine life.
It's too late to remove it.
Narrator: A potential alternative
is targeting clusters of trash
instead of sweeping the whole gyre.
Plastic in the open ocean tends to form
these plastic dust bunnies at sea.
Collecting the plastic debris is also pretty easy
once it's clumped into these dust bunnies,
because then you have a single targeted area
with an extremely high amount of plastic.
Narrator: Those clumps are mostly fishing gear,
which does the most damage.
Rebecca: By focusing on things like ghost gear,
which are really, really dangerous to marine life,
you're collecting the most harmful plastic out of the ocean,
not necessarily collecting
some of the less harmful plastic things,
like laundry baskets or buckets,
which may have a lot of life growing on them.
Narrator: The Ocean Cleanup says that in the long run,
its ocean systems will be more scalable
than manual cleaning.
When it comes to its river cleanup,
experts were more optimistic.
I loved it, and the diagrams,
how it sort of funnels it in.
I was like, that is so perfect.
Once it's in the ocean, it's a problem
that really becomes much harder to manage.
Narrator: That tracks with Boyan's results.
As of April 2023, his team has collected more than 10 times
as much plastic from rivers as from the ocean.
In Santo Domingo,
members of the Dominican navy empty the dumpsters
and send the haul to the Duquesa landfill.
Boyan: Of course, landfill's not ideal,
but at least it's a million times better
than it flowing into the ocean.
Narrator: Boyan says the river plastics
can't be recycled as easily as the ones from the ocean.
Boyan: It's much more of a mix, and also it's much more polluted.
So you have sewage water that's often in these rivers.
Narrator: Ultimately, restoring a polluted ecosystem
requires big changes.
The best way to keep plastic out of rivers and oceans
is to make less of it.
Martin: Everybody can do something,
but we also need the companies to do their part.
This needs to be a collaboration
between all sectors of society.
Narrator: In the meantime,
Carmen does what she can to clean up her own neighborhood.
In her free time, she collects water hyacinths
and transforms them into art.
Narrator: She dries the plant and weaves it into hats,
bags, and more.
Narrator: Much like plastic, the plant can be useful,
but Carmen still wants to see it gone.
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