Ocean Cleanup Project Completes Great Pacific Garbage Patch Research Expedition

hypnosec writes: The reconnaissance mission of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, dubbed the Mega Expedition by Ocean Clean, has been concluded. The large-scale cleanup of the area is set to begin in 2020. The primary goal of the Mega Expedition was to accurately determine how much plastic is floating in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. This was the first time large pieces of plastic, such as ghost nets and Japanese tsunami debris, have been quantified. “I’ve studied plastic in all the world’s oceans, but never seen any area as polluted as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” said Dr. Julia Reisser, Lead Oceanographer at The Ocean Cleanup. “With every trawl we completed, thousands of miles from land, we just found lots and lots of plastic.”

Comments

Re:Garbage what?

[jblues]

Actually the developed world tends to ship their garbage to these parts of the world, and then pretends to be surprised when it ends up in the ocean.

Re:ten years

[rmdingler]

The great thing about the plasticized pollution in the Pacific is that it tends to collect in certain areas, and much of it floats, reducing the volume of water that would need to be filtered by several orders of magnitude.

Oh yes, doing something is almost always better than doing nothing.