He hopes that by revealing what’s going on “below the surface” he can “inspire people to stop using single-use plastic and to rethink the way we live.
Ben Lecomte says his face-to-face experience with the Pacific’s garbage has prompted him to reduce his consumption of plastic. She points to companies such as Filtrol that are developing filters that remove microfibers from washing machine outflows.Īwareness-raising is another priority. It is hard to conceive of a way to remove microfibers from the ocean on a grand scale, says Royer, but she hopes that scientific data will prompt policymakers to legislate for technical fixes to prevent the fibers entering the ocean in the first place. Research on the impact of microfibers is in its infancy and “we don’t know if that would have health consequences for people who eat the fish,” she says. “Finding microfibers would show that they are not always excreted by the fish but can pass through cell walls and get lodged in flesh,” she says. Thousands of people have stopped flying because of climate change Scattered into the air or flushed down water pipes, the fibers eventually reach the ocean via waterways.
When laundered, a standard, six-kilogram load of synthetic fiber clothing releases “about 700,000 microfibers,” she says. Frequently bought together This item: Plastic, Ahoy: Investigating the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. “Most of our clothes nowadays are made out of different types of plastic including polyester, nylon, Lycra, polypropylene … and they shed microfibers at all times,” says Royer.
In clearer terms, the patch is twice the size of the state of Texas and. The patch is around 1.6 million square miles wide with the deepest layers reaching down to 100 kilograms per square kilometer in the center.
Read: Bringing back bison to restore America’s lost prairie The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is smaller than public imagination has made it out to be. She is examining the samples for plastic microfibers – microscopically small plastic threads that are a mounting cause for concern. The crew sent samples of seawater and slices of fish flesh to Sarah-Jeanne Royer, a marine plastics expert at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the expedition’s lead scientist on dry land. “It was really disturbing,” says McWhirter, “but we still ate it.” Plastic fragments were not visible in most of the dissected fish, but one mahi mahi had a piece of plastic in its stomach that was macro – not micro – in size. "Added to the 7,173 kg of plastic captured by our previous prototype systems, The Ocean Cleanup has now collected 108,526 kg of plastic from the GPGP," it further said.The stomach of a mahi mahi fish, caught by the crew, contained two small fish, three squid beaks and a large piece of vexar - a plastic commonly used by the shellfish farming industry. DLWPNkspcr- The Ocean Cleanup July 25, 2022 Thank you to our determined offshore crew and supporters worldwide together, we have now officially cleaned up 1/1000th of the GPGP. Great Pacific Garbage Patch: A mass of floating debris, mostly plastic, in the Northwest Pacific Ocean that spins around central point. "It has now collected 101,353 kg of plastic over 45 extractions, sweeping an area of ocean of over 3,000 square kilometres - comparable to the size of Luxembourg or Rhode Island," Ocean Cleanup said in the release.īREAKING: more than 100,000kg of plastic removed from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (GPGP). The clean-up of the ocean was carried out by System 002 deployed by the group in August last year. Also known as the Pacific trash vortex, GPGP is an area between Hawaii and California, where plastic and other human-made litter and debris accumulate. In a release, they said that they have cleaned nearly 1/1000 of the GPGP, which is more than the combined weight of two Boeing 737-800s.
The non-profit group, Ocean Cleanup, reached the impressive milestone earlier this week. A non-profit organisation has removed 100,000 kg of plastic from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (GPGP), a collection of marine debris in the North Pacific Ocean.