Clearing Pacific plastic patch ‘could do more harm than good’

A SCHEME to clean up plastic in the Pacific Ocean could harm wildlife and release unnecessary greenhouse gases into the air, conservationists have said.

On Sept 9, the Ocean Cleanup foundation will launch a device to sweep up plastic in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and remove it from the water.

The system uses a 2,000ft-long Ushaped floating cylinder with a 10ft skirt beneath, which moves along with the current, capturing plastic as it goes.

The refuse is corralled into a small area and then picked up by boat every few months and taken to land for processing and recycling. The Ocean Cleanup claims that full-scale deployment of their system could clean up 50 per cent of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in just five years.

However, marine experts claim the project could do more harm than good.

Dr Sue Kinsey, a senior pollution policy officer at the Marine Conservation Society, said it “seems likely” that wildlife would be affected. She added: “Also, much of this litter is distributed throughout the water column and this may only pick up surface material.”

The society also said the time and energy required to collect and return the waste could result in large amounts of greenhouse gases and carbon. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, located between California and Hawaii, is the area where plastic rubbish accumulates because of ocean currents. It is around three times the size of Spain.

Research by the foundation found that, at its peak, the patch contained around 330lb of plastic per square mile, reducing to 33lb at the edges.

The project to clean up the patch is the brainchild of Boyan Slat, a 24-yearold Dutch inventor and entrepreneur, who founded the foundation in 2013.

A survey of 15 experts, by David Shiffman, an ecologist and shark researcher at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, also found that it was unlikely the device would clean up a significant amount of plastic without harming wildlife.

One in four believed that the entire concept was “a bad idea with little or no redeeming value”.

Writing on the website Southern Fried Science, Dr Shiffman said: “This device is designed to aggregate objects of a certain size to remove them from the water but cannot distinguish between plastic and living things.

Eben Schwartz, of the California Coastal Commission, said: “To make the claim, as the Ocean Cleanup Project is, that they will ‘clean the oceans’ by 2040 or whenever, is disingenuous and misleading, when it will, at best, clean a very small percentage of what’s found on the surface.”

However, The Ocean Cleanup said that the device moved slowly enough through the water that any animals would easily have time to escape.

A Plastic Planet, the campaign group, pointed out that a large amount of plastic sinks to the bottom of the ocean and so would be missed by the device.