After three years extracting plastic waste from the notorious Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an environmental nonprofit says it can finish the job within a decade, with a price tag of several billion dollars.
Twice the size of Texas, the mass of about 79,000 metric tons of plastic floating in the Pacific Ocean between California and Hawaii is growing at an exponential pace, according to researchers.
That’s great news. It doesn’t say in the article but are they going to start on the Great Atlantic Garbage Patch after they are done?
This is a white-paper proposal for a clean-up effort that nobody wants to fund. The CEO of Ocean Cleanup has been pitching this fix since 2012. This isn’t even a new idea, its just been going through permutations of refinement since the initial proposal, with funding coming primarily from private independent donations. But we’re talking tens-of-millions raised on a project that needs 100x that amount.
And it does not appear to include the cost of physically processing the removed waste, just collecting and moving it to another location.
Given the stinginess of state governments when it comes to waste cleanup, I’m not holding my breath.