Take Two translates the day’s headlines for Southern California, making sense of the news and cultural events that affect our lives. Produced by Southern California Public Radio and broadcast from October 2012 – June 2021. Hosted by A Martinez.
An estimated eight million tons of plastic goes into our oceans every year: shampoo bottles, fishing nets, commercial waste. And that can cause serious problems for marine life and the rest of the sea ecosystem.
Now a new technology aims to capture and remove that garbage.
It's a floating structure created by a Netherlands-based company, The Ocean Cleanup, that would span more than a mile and, its designers hope, sweep up the plastic to one day generate biofuel.
In announcing the project in May, Boyan Slat, the founder of The Ocean Cleanup, said it will be "the longest floating structure ever deployed in the ocean" and is part of future plans to deploy a 100km-long system to clean up about half the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, located between Hawaii and California.
"It's an ingenious concept that has really elevated the issue of plastics in the oceans," said Nicholas Mallos, director of the Trash Free Seas program at the Ocean Conservancy. But he added that confronting the root cause of so much debris in the ocean is necessary to make lasting change.
"Our efforts are far better served to target the point sources of these materials rather than cleaning up these materials once they're in the marine environment," said Mallos.