Hundreds of miles between the coasts California and Hawaii is what’s known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch — an accumulation of plastic expanding nearly a million square miles or roughly twice the size of Texas.
The plastic, which ranges from massive fishing nets weighing more than a ton to tiny fragments often just millimeters in size, collected for decades due to a gyre, or whirlpool of currents, that focused ocean pollution from disparate areas into one localized spot (it’s not like a floating landfill, instead the plastic is suspended throughout the water column). The patch, which was discovered in 1997, has since grown to be the largest aggregation of plastic across the world’s oceans.
In 2013, Boyan Slat, an 18-year-old entrepreneur, set out to eliminate that patch. He founded The Ocean Cleanup, a nonprofit with the goal of eliminating ocean plastic, and crowdfunded nearly $2.2 million.
Slat’s team built an enormous curved device with the purpose of passively gathering trash inside the garbage patch. The 2,000-foot C-shape plastic pipe is connected to a screen that spans 10 feet below the water’s surface.
On Wednesday, following multiple setbacks, the Ocean Cleanup announced a major breakthrough: The most recent iteration of the device successfully collected and stored plastic.
This version incorporates a parachute, which serves as an anchor. The parachute slows down the vessel so that it moves just slightly slower than the ocean’s current. That allows for faster-moving plastic to accumulate in the screen. A floatline keeps the system buoyant, and due to its slow speed, sea life are able to swim below the barrier. Large fishing nets, plastic objects, like car tires and plastic bins, along with microplastics all accumulated in the device, which is called the System 001/B.
But creating a successful device wasn’t easy, and early versions had critical flaws. At one point, a 60-foot section broke off, and the entire device had to be brought back to shore. In another version, the collected trash would spill back into the ocean.
“After beginning this journey seven years ago, this first year of testing in the unforgivable environment of the high seas strongly indicates that our vision is attainable and that the beginning of our mission to rid the ocean of plastic garbage, which has accumulated for decades, is within our sights,” Boyan Slat said in a press release.
As the device catches plastic, The Ocean Cleanup’s team uses handheld nets to gather the trash, which takes a significant amount of effort. The long-term goal is for a ship to visit the patch regularly to capture the collected plastic, which will be brought to shore to be recycled.
As The Ocean Cleanup plans to create a System 002 of the device, a few key challenges remain: How will the current device hold up during a harsh winter? Can the device hold plastic for months between pickups?
“Our team has remained steadfast in its determination to solve immense technical challenges to arrive at this point. Though we still have much more work to do, I am eternally grateful for the team’s commitment and dedication to the mission and look forward to continuing to the next phase of development,” Slate said.
But Slat said he remains positive. Once the challenges are assessed and fixed, The Ocean Cleanup plans to design a fleet of devices designed to rid oceans of their plastic. With the success of a fleet, the nonprofit predicts to remove 90% of the ocean’s plastic by 2040.
More: 37 Ways to Shrink Your Use of Plastic
Tag: plastic pollution
6 High-Tech Innovations That Could Solve Our Food-Waste Woes
Americans can be a wasteful bunch. In 2014, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service estimates that our country threw away 38 million tons of food, the equivalent of every person in the country junking two-thirds of a pound every day. We dumped milk that had spoiled, vegetables that had turned brown and hamburger patties we were too full to eat. Not only did this excess cost us a collective $161 billion, it caused unnecessary environmental strain. Food waste, after all, is the most common material in landfills and incinerators, constituting 21.6 percent of all solid waste, according to the U.S.D.A. To fix the problem, there are some easy strategies each household should adopt (hint: buy less, freeze more, compost). But there are also some high-tech innovations that could revamp the entire food supply. Below, the most promising efforts at reducing waste, from the time food is first harvested all the way to its final destination in a Dumpster.
1. Diverting Unwanted Food
Because of the government’s health and safety regulations, supply counts or simply cosmetic issues, a warehouse manager might reject a food shipment before it even makes it to the retail stand. The app Food Cowboy redirects this ugly or unwanted surplus to food banks. A truck driver simply programs her route into the mobile app, along with what’s on offer, like a pallet of bruised bananas or knobby carrots. By the time she’s ready to hit the road, the driver might receive a message from a charity who will meet her at a rest stop to take the produce. The soup kitchen gets their week’s supply of produce, and the distributor can take a tax deduction for the donation: a win-win.
2. Rethinking Plastic Packaging
Beyond the tons of food that Americans discard, there’s also the problem of all the packaging in which it’s wrapped: the egg cartons, salsa jars and snack wrappers, not to mention shopping bags. Scientists at the U.S.D.A. are trying to replace the ubiquitous plastic in grocery aisles with a mixture of casein, an edible milk protein, and pectin, a citrus extract often used to thicken jams. As long as it’s kept dry, the biodegradable film is actually 250 times better than plastic at blocking oxygen, which helps prevent food from going stale. And, because it’s edible, a consumer could plunk the whole package into water for an extra protein boost. “Everything is in smaller and smaller packaging, which is great for grabbing for lunch [or] for school, but then it generates so much waste,” Laetitia Bonnaillie, a U.S.D.A. researcher who co-led the research, tells Bloomberg. “Edible packaging can be great for that.”
3. Looking Beyond the Sell-By Date
We tend to throw out massive quantities of food because it spoils before we can eat it. Or, more accurately, because we worry that it has. Often, though, food is perfectly safe to eat after the sell-by date, but a home cook won’t want to take the risk of poisoning his family. The FoodKeeper App, a collaboration by the U.S.D.A.’s Food Safety and Inspection Service and Cornell University, provides guidelines online about whether an ingredient has spoiled and how long it can be kept in a pantry, refrigerator or freezer. So far, the database contains over 400 different food and beverage items.
If that’s not technical enough to determine whether food’s still safe to eat, M.I.T. scientists have another device: chemically actuated resonant devices (or more simply, CARDs), which can tell if food has gone bad by the gases it releases. “The beauty of these sensors is that they are really cheap. You put them up, they sit there, and then you come around and read them [with a smartphone]. There’s no wiring involved. There’s no power,” says Timothy Swager, the chemistry professor whose lab built gas-detecting sensors. Pretty soon, this “smart packaging” could do a more reliable job than the old trick of taking a whiff.
4. Bypassing the Landfill
Only 5.1 percent of the food Americans currently trash is diverted; the rest ends up in the dump. Over time, this refuse releases clouds of pollutants into the atmosphere: either smoky emissions as it burns in an incinerator or methane, a gas that’s 28 times more dangerous for global warming than carbon dioxide, as it decomposes in a landfill. To reduce the burden on dumps, a device known as the Eco-Safe Digester, produced by BioHiTech for commercial kitchens like The Cheesecake Factory and those inside Marriott hotels, can divert up to 2,500 pounds of waste elsewhere daily. Liquefied by hungry microorganisms, a sloshing smoothie of leftovers goes down the drain, reducing the burden on dumps. That is, as long as the municipal sewers can handle the extra wastewater.
5. Cutting Back in Commercial Kitchens
As chefs rush to meet diners’ demands, some waste is expected. For many restaurants and dining halls, the thinking goes that it’s better to have a surplus of entrées ready than to run out halfway through dinner. But what if these establishments are consistently overdoing it? LeanPath, an Oregon-based software company, analyzes what’s being trashed in commercial kitchens and creates actionable steps for managers, cooks and servers to reduce waste. “Our business is about culture and shaping behavior,” Andrew Shakman, the co-founder, tells Bloomberg. “It’s not rocket science to figure out how to make less mashed potatoes. It is hard to identify that it’s mashed potatoes [that are overproduced] and to change behavior.” After staff has inputted a night’s worth of waste, the algorithm might recommend eliminating the rhubarb no one ever orders, peeling less skin off the potatoes or adding one less bread roll in the basket. By following its advice, LeanPath estimates it can save up to 6 percent of a kitchen’s food costs.
6. Designing a Smarter Dumpster
Of course, some food will always make its way to the rubbish heap. And when it does, we might as well have garbage trucks pick it up in the most efficient way possible. Compology, a San Francisco waste-management startup, installs sensors on dumpsters to gauge volume. As the bins fill to capacity, an algorithm plans drivers’ most efficient route, eliminating the stop-and-go emissions from weekly garbage collection. The more infrequent pickups can also save haulers tons of cash, up to 40 percent of collection costs, according to the co-founders’ reports from Santa Cruz, Calif., where sensors already been installed.
Continue reading “6 High-Tech Innovations That Could Solve Our Food-Waste Woes”
This Coalition is Confronting a Big Problem with Music Festivals
Stick around to the end of a music festival or concert, and the grounds can look like a graveyard of disposable cups and discarded plastic bottles. While it’s not unusual for a concert-goer to go through a few bottles of water or other beverages while enjoying some music, when the party’s over, this plastic pollution seriously adds up.
That’s why, as Rolling Stone reports, the Plastic Pollution Coalition (that’s made up of individuals and institutions dedicated to eliminating plastic waste on a global scale) have made it a mission to stamp out this environmentally harmful, single-use item at concerts.
The coalition’s project, Plastic Free Touring, advises artists such as Jackson Browne, Ben Harper and Crosby, Stills and Nash to reduce their plastic footprint while on the road. The coalition also partnered with this year’s Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival, where revelers could purchase stainless steel water bottles and beer cups (and receive a $1 discount for every subsequent beer purchase), which could be used to stay hydrated with free water refill sites.
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Dianna Cohen, eco-activist and Plastic Pollution Coalition co-founder, tells Rolling Stone that she wants to expand this plastic-free initiative outside of the music arena. “This can be extended to sporting venues and schools,” she says. “I’d also like to see venues offer more people options of producing beverages from kegs, large containers and soda fountains.”
She adds that she has a larger goal to wipe out humanity’s plastic bottle habit for good. “Millions and millions of bottles are sold every minute,” she says. (About 2.4 million tons is discarded annually, with 75 percent going straight to the landfill.) “It’s insane, just collective madness.”
Besides the plastic carnage, concerts (and just about any other event that attracts large crowds) use up a lot of other resources — from the countless fliers that get handed out to the amount of carbon that is emitted when people travel to shows.
However, more and more artists and bands such as Radiohead, Drake, Phish, and The Roots are embracing sustainability, utilizing biodiesel tour buses and compostable catering. Large gatherings are opportune moments for musicians and concert organizers to be role models in sustainability. After all, why can’t concerts be fun and work towards the greater good at the same time?
DON’T MISS: 37 Ways to Shrink Your Use of Plastic
The Problem With Your Washing Machine That’s Hard to See But Impossible to Ignore
How does doing the laundry cause pollution?
According to a 2011 study from ecologist Mark Browne, in an average wash, 1900 fibers come off a single synthetic piece of clothing such as polyester, acrylic and nylon. What’s scary is that these tiny plastic fibers — aka microplastics — are released into waterways around the globe. In his paper, Browne wrote that microplastic was found on every site he visited. That’s 18 coasts on six continents, from the earth’s poles to the equator.
As the Guardian reports from Browne’s study, 85 percent of man-made material found on coastlines were microfibers. Unsuspecting marine animals are also eating these synthetic particles, which means it can possibly enter the food chain.
“We found that these particles of plastic can transfer, once they have been ingested they can transfer from their gut to their circulatory system i.e. into their blood and accumulate in their blood cells and they are still there months later,” Browne said in an interview. “So our major concern is that there could be infiltration of this material into the food chain and so we really need to understand how much is in the environment and whether or not animals in the food chain have been affected.”
So that’s how innocently washing our clothes can cause pollution — and this is clearly a big problem.
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However, unlike the prominent fight to ban cosmetic microbeads, getting clothing and appliance companies to help stop the shedding of microplastics has been an uphill climb.
According to the Guardian, since his study, Browne has asked to partner with popular outdoor apparel companies such as Patagonia, Nike and Polartec to research ways to improve their textile design so it won’t shed as many plastic fibers. Unfortunately, besides women’s clothing brand Eileen Fisher, no other company has offered to support him in his research. Browne has also reached out to washing machine manufactures such as Siemens, Dyson and LG to discuss developing filters that can stop microfibers from reaching water, but no answer either.
So if these industries don’t listen, how can we fix this? Don’t buy synthetic fibers such as nylons or fleece. For the ones you already own, try not to wash it as often or choose gentler washing settings. Also stick with natural fibers such as wool, cotton, hemp or silk which break down but don’t harm the environment.
DON’T MISS: 5 Simple Ways to Make Your Wardrobe More Earth-Friendly
The Surprising Second Life of Plastic
At home, at work, at the grocery store — plastic sneaks into our lives in countless ways. The ubiquitous material is undeniably convenient, but using it in such large quantities comes at a great cost to our environment.
Unfortunately, Americans generate about 10.5 million tons of plastic waste a year. Since only 1 to 2 percent of it is recycled, it either ends up in the landfill or gets dumped in the ocean. In fact, 90 percent of all trash floating on the ocean’s surface is plastic.
But plastic doesn’t have to be a waste. In Akron, Ohio a company is giving it a second life by turning it into fuel. RES Polyflow specializes in pyrolysis, which is basically a process that turns plastic and rubber waste into energy.
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According to Chemistry World, a single RES plant operating at full capacity could convert 60 tons of plastic waste a day, which translates to 1.4 million liters (about 370,000 gallons) of transportation fuel annually. The company says they will be operational in the first quarter of 2016.
The potential of pyrolysis technology could be huge. In a study from the American Chemistry Council (ACC), pyrolysis not only reduces the tremendous amount of plastic waste that the country sends to the dumps, but it could also contribute $9 billion to the county’s economy and create about 40,000 domestic jobs, Chemistry World reports.
While turning plastic into fuel isn’t exactly the most sustainable form of energy, it can help the country curb its reliance on foreign fossil fuels. Also, as RES Polymer CEO Jay Schabel says, “We are taking a waste stream that is in abundance and readily available in every large city, and turning it into a finished product with a lot of demand, instead of it just going into a landfill.”
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Got Two Hands and 30 Minutes? You Can Help Clean Up Our World
When it comes to social action, we can accomplish much more together than we ever could alone. That’s the idea behind the Two Hands Project, a worldwide collaborative campaign that seeks to eradicate plastic pollution from the environment, 30 minutes at a time. Two Hands is taking a grassroots approach to cleaning up our world, by asking citizens to complete a simple task: pick up (and ultimately recycle) trash for 30 minutes at a time, anywhere in the world. Originally launched in Australia by Paul Sharp and Silke Stuckenbrock, the Two Hands Project has used successful social media campaigns to inspire people from every continent to get involved and upload pictures of their “hauls” to the organization’s Facebook page, which now boasts more than 40,000 “likes.”
The organization is also working with governments and other industries to promote the development of a global reusable packaging and deposit system to replace disposable packaging — one of the main causes of plastic pollution — and a “cash for butts” program to deal with the overwhelming amount of cigarette butts found in the environment. But they’re not waiting for government intervention to realize their goal of a better world. “The broader idea is, you can take your two hands and apply it to anything in your own community that needs fixing; it can be social, environmental, anything at all,” Sharp says. With more than 7 billion people in the world, just imagine how much we could accomplish if everyone chipped in.
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