Author Archives: David Evans

A Democratic proposal to help finance the party’s $3.5 trillion spending bill by taxing single-use plastics is generating sharp pushback from members of the industry, who argue it would produce more waste and hurt average Americans.The Senate Finance Committee is weighing the idea of a tax on the sale of virgin plastic resin — the base materials used to make single-use plastics — as one potential way to pay for the mammoth spending bill, according to a document released earlier this month.But the proposal has garnered fierce opposition from the plastics division of the American Chemistry Council (ACC), a trade group representing 28 companies including oil giants such as ExxonMobil, Chevron and Shell as well as major chemical manufacturers such as DuPont and Dow Chemical.ADVERTISEMENTThe group argues that such a levy would amount to some $40 billion in additional taxes and “punish Americans” who depend on plastics in electric vehicles, home insulation, electronics and packaging, while funding unrelated government programs and fueling inflation.“Plastic goes into a variety of applications, not just food packaging,” Joshua Baca, vice president of the ACC’s plastics division, told The Hill. “At the end of the day, this would result in a regressive tax that would largely impact those who can least afford it.”Baca argued that implementation of the measure would lead to “incentivizing the use of other materials — whether that’s paper, glass, aluminum — all of which have a higher [carbon] footprint than plastics.”Manufacturing such alternatives produces 2.7 times more greenhouse emissions than their plastic counterparts and consumes twice as much energy, Baca contended.If all plastic bottles were replaced by glass ones, the power necessary to manufacture them would be the equivalent to running 22 large coal fired power plants, he said, arguing that such a shift would negatively impact the climate and “also be detrimental to our economy.” A plastic resin tax is not the only funding option under consideration for the $3.5 trillion spending bill. The Senate Finance Committee is also discussing taxes on stock buybacks and on corporations whose CEO pay exceeds the pay of their average workers, as well as energy-tax proposals.ADVERTISEMENTThe idea for a plastics tax was first introduced by Sen. Sheldon WhitehouseSheldon WhitehouseDemocrats draw red lines in spending fight What Republicans should demand in exchange for raising the debt ceiling Climate hawks pressure Biden to replace Fed chair MORE (D-R.I.) in August. His bill, known as the REDUCE Act, would impose a 20-cent per pound fee on the sale of new plastic for single-use producers — with the goal of helping “recycled plastics compete with virgin plastics on more equal footing,” according to Whitehouse’s office.“Plastic pollution chokes our oceans, hastens climate change, and threatens people’s well-being,” Whitehouse said last month. “On its own, the plastics industry has done far too little to address the damage its products cause, so this bill gives the market a stronger incentive toward less plastic waste and more recycled plastic.” This “excise tax” — a duty imposed on a specific good — would apply to virgin resin, according to Whitehouse’s bill. Manufacturers, producers and importers of the resin would pay $0.10 per pound in 2022, which would gradually rise to $0.20 per pound in 2024.The fees generated by this process would go toward a Plastic Waste Reduction Fund, which would serve to improve recycling activities. The ACC immediately opposed the REDUCE Act in August, arguing that policymakers should instead adopt comprehensive policies that could lead to a “circular economy” — an economy in which production and consumption focuses on extending the lifecycle of products and minimizing waste, as defined by the European Union.Some policies the ACC has backed include requiring plastic packaging to contain 30 percent recycled plastic by 2030, developing a national recycling standard for plastics and studying the impact of greenhouse gases from materials, among other proposals.Baca stressed the importance of establishing a better set of recycling standards for communities across the country, arguing that suitable regulations for recycling technologies would ensure “that private sector investment continues to happen at a commercial scale.”“When you tie all of those things together, that is how you get a circular system,” Baca said. The need to transition domestic recycling programs to a “circular economy” was the topic of discussion at a Senate Environment and Public Works Committee hearing on Wednesday. “I love the idea of a circular economy, where things — and the materials they are made of — can be reused over and over again instead of ending up in a landfill somewhere,” Committee Chairman Tom CarperThomas (Tom) Richard CarperOvernight Energy & Environment — Presented by the League of Conservation Voters — EPA finalizing rule cutting HFCs EPA finalizes rule cutting use of potent greenhouse gas used in refrigeration The Hill’s Morning Report – Presented by AT&T – US speeds evacuations as thousands of Americans remain in Afghanistan MORE (D-Del.) said at the hearing.Carper called upon companies to “step up and take greater responsibility for reducing, reusing and recycling their products,” adding that the government should play a role in ensuring that industry can succeed in this effort.In response to the hearing, Baca said that the ACC submitted statements expressing the group’s viewpoints, including measures it would support.ADVERTISEMENTAsked how the group’s members are working to make hard plastics easier to recycle, Baca explained that traditional recycling tools have their limitations and more advanced systems must be developed to break down plastics into their basic building blocks.Tennessee-based Eastman Chemical has invested in a $150 million plastics facility that will come online soon, he said, adding that ExxonMobil has partnered with Oregon-based Agilyx to launch a joint plastic recycling venture.Baca also said that due to supply chain issues, plastic manufacturers cannot all overhaul their plants to use solely recycled or biobased feedstock. To use more recycled plastic, companies need to either have the innovative technologies to break down hard-to-recycle materials or the means to collect feedstock, he said.To date, Baca said, the plastics industry has invested almost $7 billion in promoting advanced recycling technologies, which he called “a step in the right direction,” as many companies begin to launch these technologies on a commercial scale.“Brands have made a commitment to use more recycled plastics,” Baca said. “If we don’t produce and make that material we won’t be in business. This is not only good for our company, bottom line, but it’s good for the environment.”

Consumers in some Northern Virginia communities will have to pay for plastic bags starting next year.Fairfax County became the first Virginia locality in the Chesapeake Bay watershed to pass a five-cent fee on the use of plastic retail bags when the measure was approved by its Board of Supervisors in mid-September. Alexandria and Arlington followed suit later the same week, passing their own versions of the measure.

Trash piles up in a portion of Little Hunting Creek, a tributary of the Potomac River, just downstream from the Janna Lee Avenue bridge in Alexandria, VA. 

Whitney Pipkin

The purpose of the fee, sometimes called a tax, is to discourage use of disposable plastic bags, which are among the most common items found as litter in local waterways.Plastic bags “damage aquatic ecosystems and the micro-particles of plastics created when they break down make their way into our water sources,” Fairfax County Board Supervisor James Walkinshaw wrote in a statement.
“Plastic bag taxes are proven in jurisdictions across the nation,” he said. “This measure will reduce plastic pollution, and the modest funds collected will be reinvested into litter prevention and to providing reusable bags for low-income community members.”

Plastic bags and bottles are among the most common forms of plastic that wash into waterways. Plastics break down into microscopic pieces that carry toxins and are found in streams, rivers, oceans and the Chesapeake Bay. (Donna Morelli)

The City of Roanoke, which is not within Virginia’s portion of the Chesapeake watershed, was the first locality in the state to pass a plastic bag fee. The Virginia General Assembly, which must give cities and counties permission to pass such local measures, approved legislation in 2020 allowing them to adopt plastic bag ordinances.The District of Columbia and several localities in Maryland already charge five-cent fees on plastic bags. Maryland’s General Assembly nearly passed a statewide plastic bag ban in 2020 and 2021. Studies have shown a correlation between such fees and bans on certain disposable products and reduced plastic waste in nearby rivers.Fairfax County’s five-cent fee on plastic bags will go into effect on Jan. 1, 2022.

Artificial turf. Photo: Mabel Amber/pixabay
State regulators are cracking down on where property owners may install artificial turf near coastal waterways.
During the meeting of the Coastal Resources Commission Wednesday, Sept. 15, Robb Mairs, minor permits coordinator with the North Carolina Division of Coastal Management’s Wilmington office, said the use of artificial turf within the state’s 75-foot coastal shorelines area of environmental concern, or AEC, and associated 30-foot buffer “suddenly emerged” this year.
The seemingly new trend has raised concerns about certain materials used to install artificial grass, the different types of material used to make artificial turf, whether those materials are pervious or not, and how their proximity to coastal waters may affect water quality.
Coastal Resources Commission rules restrict development within the 30-foot buffer to water uses, including docks, piers, boat ramps, bulkheads and accessways. There are some exceptions to the rules, such as pile-supported signs, elevated, slatted wooden boardwalks, crab shedders, decks and grading, excavation, and landscaping as long as it excludes wetland fill — unless required by permit in a shoreline-stabilization project.
However, the state does not have standards for artificial turf being installed within that buffer, Mairs explained.
Coastal AECs include wetlands, estuarine waters, public trust areas and estuarine and public trust shorelines.
The 30-foot buffer within those AECs is considered by state coastal officials to be particularly crucial in protecting water quality.
Division of Coastal Management officials this past May first caught wind of artificial turf being installed within the 75-foot AEC in Wrightsville Beach, according to Christy Simmons, division spokesperson.
“That case was resolved through an enforcement action and the shoreline buffer was restored,” Simmons said in an email.
Since then, the division has been reviewing cases in Corolla in Currituck County, Topsail Beach in Pender County and Wrightsville Beach in New Hanover County, she said. In some of those cases, artificial turf will have to be removed, at least from within the 30-foot shoreline buffer.
“In the limited enforcement cases we’ve had so far, we’ve only required removal of the artificial turf and have not assessed any civil penalties,” Simmons said.
As division permit officers are handling these cases, they’re fielding a growing interest from property owners and landscapers asking about placing artificial turf within the coastal shoreline AEC.
Part of the debate about regulating artificial turf within the AEC goes to the question whether fake grass and the materials used to install it are impervious.
Coastal Resources Commissioner Neal Andrew said at the commission’s Sept. 15 meeting that he’d seen some of the artificial turf that has been installed in Wrightsville Beach.
“It appears water does drain through this material and therefore appears to act as a pervious surface,” he said. “I personally don’t see an issue with it being outside that 30-foot range.”
Division Director Braxton Davis said it had yet to be determined whether artificial turf is pervious and that any such determination may have to be concluded on a case-by-case basis.
Mairs said the problem is that some components of artificial turf appear to be inconsistent with standards set by the North Carolina Division of Water Resources and state Energy, Mineral and Land Resources, or DEMLR, state stormwater section.
DEMLR staff say they would have to decide case-by-case whether artificial turf is pervious.
Any such determination would not preclude DEMLR’s regulations that require vegetated setbacks from surface waters in coastal stormwater permits. The rules mandate that the area within the buffer remain vegetated unless one or more exceptions in the rules have been met.
Artificial turf is not an exception.
Buffer rules in the Tar-Pamlico and Neuse rivers do not include artificial turf in their table of uses.
Division of Water Resources officials advised that artificial turf appears to contradict the intent of the rules to preserve the buffer as a function for removing nutrients.
Water resources officials have expressed concerns about the potential of small plastic fibers, and rubber or silica beads sometimes mixed into soil under the turf during installation getting into nearby waters and potentially violating state water quality standards.
Larry Baldwin, vice chair for the Coastal Resources Commission, said that if artificial turf is installed for the purpose of stormwater infiltration, design could make a difference, especially if it were to cut down on potential nutrient runoff if turf is used replace fertilized grass.
“I’m kind of torn on this in terms of what’s better for water quality,” he said.
Commissioners voted 10-1, with Baldwin dissenting, to prohibit the installation of artificial turf within the 30-foot buffer.
“I think if we’re all concerned about water quality I’m going to make it as simple for staff as possible and protect the last line of defense for our waters,” said commission Chair Renee Cahoon.
Commissioner Craig Bromby said the commission should look further into the matter.
“I think we can maintain the status quo and endorse (the division’s) interpretation, but I think this needs looking at,” he said.

An alarming new study finds that infant feces contain 10 times more polyethylene terephthalate (aka polyester) than an adult’s.Whenever a plastic bag or bottle degrades, it breaks into ever smaller pieces that work their way into nooks in the environment. When you wash synthetic fabrics, tiny plastic fibers break loose and flow out to sea. When you drive, plastic bits fly off your tires and brakes. That’s why literally everywhere scientists look, they’re finding microplastics—specks of synthetic material that measure less than 5 millimeters long. They’re on the most remote mountaintops and in the deepest oceans. They’re blowing vast distances in the wind to sully once pristine regions like the Arctic. In 11 protected areas in the western US, the equivalent of 120 million ground-up plastic bottles are falling out of the sky each year.And now, microplastics are coming out of babies. In a pilot study published today, scientists describe sifting through infants’ dirty diapers and finding an average of 36,000 nanograms of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) per gram of feces, 10 times the amount they found in adult feces. They even found it in newborns’ first feces. PET is an extremely common polymer that’s known as polyester when it’s used in clothing, and it is also used to make plastic bottles. The finding comes a year after another team of researchers calculated that preparing hot formula in plastic bottles severely erodes the material, which could dose babies with several million microplastic particles a day, and perhaps nearly a billion a year. Although adults are bigger, scientists think that in some ways infants have more exposure. In addition to drinking from bottles, babies could be ingesting microplastics in a dizzying number of ways. They have a habit of putting everything in their mouths—plastic toys of all kinds, but they’ll also chew on fabrics. (Microplastics that shed from synthetic textiles are known more specifically as microfibers, but they’re plastic all the same.) Babies’ foods are wrapped in single-use plastics. Children drink from plastic sippy cups and eat off plastic plates. The carpets they crawl on are often made of polyester. Even hardwood floors are coated in polymers that shed microplastics. Any of this could generate tiny particles that children breathe or swallow. Indoor dust is also emerging as a major route of microplastic exposure, especially for infants. (In general, indoor air is absolutely lousy with them; each year you could be inhaling tens of thousands of particles.) Several studies of indoor spaces have shown that each day in a typical household, 10,000 microfibers might land on a single square meter of floor, having flown off of clothing, couches, and bed sheets. Infants spend a significant amount of their time crawling through the stuff, agitating the settled fibers and kicking them up into the air. “Unfortunately, with the modern lifestyle, babies are exposed to so many different things for which we don’t know what kind of effect they can have later in their life,” says Kurunthachalam Kannan, an environmental health scientist at New York University School of Medicine and coauthor of the new paper, which appears in the journal Environmental Science and Technology Letters. The researchers did their tally by collecting dirty diapers from six 1-year-olds and running the feces through a filter to collect the microplastics. They did the same with three samples of meconium—a newborn’s first feces—and stool samples from 10 adults. In addition to analyzing the samples for PET, they also looked for polycarbonate plastic, which is used as a lightweight alternative to glass, for instance in eyeglass lenses. To make sure that they only counted the microplastics that came from the infants’ guts, and not from their diapers, they ruled out the plastic that the diapers were made of: polypropylene, a polymer that’s distinct from polycarbonate and PET.All told, PET concentrations were 10 times higher in infants than in adults, while polycarbonate levels were more even between the two groups. The researchers found smaller amounts of both polymers in the meconium, suggesting that babies are born with plastics already in their systems. This echoes previous studies that have found microplastics in human placentas and meconium.What this all means for human health—and, more urgently, for infant health—scientists are now racing to find out. Different varieties of plastic can contain any of at least 10,000 different chemicals, a quarter of which are of concern for people, according to a recent study from researchers at ​​ETH Zürich in Switzerland. These additives serve all kinds of plastic-making purposes, like providing flexibility, extra strength, or protection from UV bombardment, which degrades the material. Microplastics may contain heavy metals like lead, but they also tend to accumulate heavy metals and other pollutants as they tumble through the environment. They also readily grow a microbial community of viruses, bacteria, and fungi, many of which are human pathogens.Of particular concern are a class of chemicals called endocrine-disrupting chemicals, or EDCs, which disrupt hormones and have been connected to reproductive, neurological, and metabolic problems, for instance increased obesity. The infamous plastic ingredient bisphenol A, or BPA, is one such EDC that has been linked to various cancers. “We should be concerned because the EDCs in microplastics have been shown to be linked with several adverse outcomes in human and animal studies,” says Jodi Flaws, a reproductive toxicologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who led a 2020 study from the Endocrine Society on plastics. (She wasn’t involved in this new research.) “Some of the microplastics contain chemicals that can interfere with the normal function of the endocrine system.” Infants are especially vulnerable to EDCs, since the development of their bodies depends on a healthy endocrine system. “I strongly believe that these chemicals do affect early life stages,” says Kannan. “That’s a vulnerable period.”This new research adds to a growing body of evidence that babies are highly exposed to microplastic. “This is a very interesting paper with some very worrying numbers,” says University of Strathclyde microplastic researcher Deonie Allen, who wasn’t involved in the study. “We need to look at everything a child is exposed to, not just their bottles and toys.”Since infants are passing microplastics in their feces, that means the gut could be absorbing some of the particles, like it would absorb nutrients from food. This is known as translocation: Particularly small particles might pass through the gut wall and end up in other organs, including the brain. Researchers have actually demonstrated this in carp by feeding them plastic particles, which translocated through the gut and worked their way to the head, where they caused brain damage that manifested as behavioral problems: Compared to control fish, the individuals with plastic particles in their brains were less active and ate more slowly.But that was done with very high concentrations of particles, and in an entirely different species. While scientists know that EDCs are bad news, they don’t yet know what level of microplastic exposure it would take to cause problems in the human body. “We need many more studies to confirm the doses and types of chemicals in microplastics that lead to adverse outcomes,” says Flaws.In the meantime, microplastics researchers say you can limit children’s contact with particles. Do not prepare infant formula with hot water in a plastic bottle—use a glass bottle and transfer it over to the plastic one once the liquid reaches room temperature. Vacuum and sweep to keep floors clear of microfibers. Avoid plastic wrappers and containers when possible. Microplastics have contaminated every aspect of our lives, so while you’ll never get rid of them, you can at least reduce your family’s exposure.More Great WIRED Stories📩 The latest on tech, science, and more: Get our newsletters!Rain boots, turning tides, and the search for a missing boyBetter data on ivermectin is finally on the wayA bad solar storm could cause an “internet apocalypse”New York City wasn’t built for 21st-century storms9 PC games you can play forever👁️ Explore AI like never before with our new database🎮 WIRED Games: Get the latest tips, reviews, and more🏃🏽‍♀️ Want the best tools to get healthy? 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By 2025, the fast-food chain aims to “drastically” cut plastic in Happy Meal toys worldwide. More-sustainable toys could be made from cardboard and recycled materials, the company says.
US-based fast-food giant McDonald’s announced plans on Tuesday to reduce plastic in its famous Happy Meal toys. McDonald’s said it was considering alternatives, such as three-dimensional cardboard toys or board games with plant-based or recycled materials, to help it “drastically reduce plastics.”  Sustainable Happy Meal toys will be rolled out by the end of 2025, McDonald’s said. “In a few more years, every Happy Meal toy in every Happy Meal around the world, no matter where you are, will be more sustainable,” said the company’s chief sustainability officer, Jenny McColloch. McDonald’s restaurants in the UK and Ireland already offer only soft toys, paper-based toys or books with the kids meal.  Eliminating 90% of ‘virgin’ plastic McDonald’s sells more than 1 billion toys each year. “Transitioning to more renewable, recycled, and certified materials for our Happy Meal toys will result in an approximately 90% reduction in virgin fossil fuel-based plastic use against a 2018 baseline,” McDonald’s said in a statement.  In recent years, the world’s largest restaurant chain has tried to respond to criticism over its use of plastic. In 2018, Mcdonald’s said it would make recycling available in all of its restaurants by 2025. The company has also switched to environmentally friendly packaging materials.  As the name implies, virgin plastic is newly produced rather than recycled. Since the 1950s, roughly 8.3 billion tons of plastic have been produced, with only around 9% of that recycled.

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A garbage truck turns off the road, engine rumbling, brakes wheezing, and the smell of rot trailing in its wake. The truck stops short and starts to reverse—beep, beep, beeping down a boat launch. With salt water lapping at its rear tires it stops, opens its tailgate, and dumps its load of cups, straws, bottles, shopping bags, fishing buoys, and nets.
A minute later, this plastic waste is floating away on a journey to pollute the ocean and poison the food chain. As the garbage truck drives away it passes another truck preparing to back down the ramp. And another pulling into the marina—one of an endless stream of garbage trucks, each lining up to dump its own load of plastics.
It doesn’t happen like this, of course, but eight million tonnes of plastic does end up in the ocean every year—the equivalent of a garbage truck’s–worth every minute. And the rate is increasing. If nothing changes, the amount of plastic sloshing around the ocean could double in 10 years. By 2050, that mass of plastic could exceed the weight of all the fish in the sea.
The costs to society and the environment are huge. A study by the consultancy firm Deloitte shows that, every year, up to 1,000,000 seabirds and 100,000 marine mammals and sea turtles die after ingesting or being entangled by plastic. Microscopic bits of plastic are working their way up the food chain, including in the seafood we eat. Plastic floating around the ocean carries invasive species that compete with or prey on native species. And when it washes onto beaches, plastic pollution affects tourism and devalues real estate. In its examination for 2018, Deloitte pegged the price of ocean plastic pollution at US $6-billion to $19-billion. That’s cheap compared with another study, which calculated the cost at up to $2.5-trillion per year, or $33,000 per tonne. None of that accounts for plastic’s costs to human health. Yet along its production cycle from oil and gas refining to use and disposal, plastic produces chemical emissions that have been linked to hormone disruption and cancer.
It’s enough to motivate teenage entrepreneurs, philanthropists, corporations, nonprofit organizations, governments, university students, and afflicted communities around the world to take action. Their ideas are seemingly as diverse as the species living in the sea: a Korean program pays fishermen to collect plastic at sea. In Baltimore, Maryland, the cartoonish Mr. Trash Wheel skims up to 17 tonnes of garbage out of the city’s harbor in a day. Inspired by the plankton-filtering ways of the whale shark, Singapore-based Drone Solutions created the WasteShark, an autonomous drone that sucks up floating bits of plastic in harbors. Chinese and Australian researchers are exploring the potential to use nanotechnology to pull microplastics out of the water in wastewater treatment facilities. Other efforts range from collecting old nets at harbors, to making plastic itself a currency to incentivize its collection, to using multimillion-dollar booms to skim plastic from the ocean’s surface, to volunteers diving to the seafloor to clean it up. There’s little doubt these efforts are well intentioned. But they are not all equal.
There is a harsh reality that all of us concerned with the mounting ocean plastic problem must confront: the vast majority of the plastic in the ocean is too small or too out of reach to ever be cleaned up. It is suspended in the water column, settled on the ocean floor, or degraded into microscopic particles that are difficult to detect, let alone collect.
That realization is vital. With the plastic pollution problem growing increasingly dire, and with so many potential solutions on offer—all competing for limited funding, resources, and public support—it is more urgent than ever to focus on the approaches that are most likely to succeed.

One of the best-known and best-funded efforts, the Ocean Cleanup, is instructional in understanding not only the size of the ocean plastic problem, but also the challenge of cleaning it up.
Founded in 2013 by then-18-year-old Boyan Slat, the nonprofit has raised more than $35-million to clean up the five gyres, convergence zones in the world’s oceans where plastic tends to concentrate. Slat’s first target is the North Pacific’s infamous Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
The Ocean Cleanup has tested multiple iterations of its plastic-catching booms. Though the project has seen some success in capturing plastic waste, a fundamental flaw plagues the approach. Photo by Abaca Press/Alamy Stock Photo
Slat’s plan is to harness the currents and the wind to herd the bigger floating pieces of plastic into horseshoe-shaped booms. Just as windblown trash gets ensnared in a fence, the plastic should get trapped in the booms until a boat can come to haul the debris to shore. Sounds simple. But after its first two pilot projects failed to gather trash, the Ocean Cleanup is years behind schedule. With a successful test of its third design in 2019, the organization says it is back on track to deploy 60 of its devices in all the world’s oceans within the next decade. In 2018, it estimated it could clean up 50 percent of the plastic in the ocean by 2023. It’s an audacious claim that many doubt is possible (not just because, by 2021, the organization had yet to deploy any operational booms). Yet Slat notes he has hired more than 100 staff and experts to help develop the project’s signature booms. He also likes to say that, sometimes, tackling big problems requires an outside perspective and a venture capitalist’s attitude.
“Rather than doing many small things that you hope add up, it’s much more effective to work on projects that are high risk and high reward,” he told Digital Trends in 2019. “If one of them works, you can actually solve the whole problem, or at least a large part of it.”
Through its trials, the Ocean Cleanup has helped spread awareness of the problem of plastic pollution. The organization has improved the scientific understanding of the kinds of plastic in the ocean and where it’s coming from. But from its inception, independent scientists have been critical of the Ocean Cleanup. Some expressed concerns about the unintended harm the booms could pose to marine life, such as pelagic fishes, sea turtles, and marine mammals. A well-discussed issue has been the booms’ effects on the neuston, a little-known community of organisms that lives in the ocean gyres. The neuston includes animals, plants, and microorganisms—like the Portuguese man-of-war, sea snails, and the sail jellyfish—that drift with the wind and currents. Neuston and plastic debris, maneuvered by the same forces, occur in the same areas. Collecting the plastic means collecting neuston, with unknown consequences for the open-ocean food chain.
Sail jellyfish and other neuston, creatures that are carried around the ocean by the wind and currents, are at risk of being ensnared by the Ocean Cleanup’s booms. Photo by Flip Nicklin/Minden Pictures
But a more direct concern for the Ocean Cleanup’s goal of cleaning up the five gyres is just how difficult it is to trap plastic in the open ocean. While there is plenty of plastic floating on the surface of the North Pacific gyre, even more is out of reach, suspended in the water column and degraded into tiny pieces that slip right through the booms.
Sönke Hohn, a biologist specializing in mathematical modeling at the Leibniz Centre for Tropical Marine Research in Germany, is one of the Ocean Cleanup’s many skeptics. Last year, in collaboration with researchers in the United Kingdom and Germany, Hohn published an analysis of what it would take for the Ocean Cleanup to collect only the floating plastic in the largest five gyres. Hohn and his colleagues took the current amount of plastic in the ocean, added annual inputs, and compared it with how much plastic the Ocean Cleanup’s successful pilot collected. In the project’s 20-year estimated timeline, Hohn’s math showed that the Ocean Cleanup’s efforts would have no noticeable effect on the amount of plastic in the ocean. To clean up a fraction of one percent of the total, the Ocean Cleanup would have to run nonstop until 2150. Even when Hohn artificially increased the fleet to 200 booms, the project still only recovered five percent of the floating plastic.
“That was with an optimistic scenario,” Hohn says.
Logistics aside, Hohn also worries about the optics of the Ocean Cleanup’s efforts. If the project even appears to be working, the rest of us could feel absolved from action, he says. “The media and the public love the story of a young guy coming along to save the ocean,” Hohn says. “We like to think: he’s solved the problem. We don’t have to change anything. The truth is, we can’t rely on technology to clean up the ocean.”
Like many of his colleagues in marine plastic research, Hohn thinks the whole principle of cleaning up the ocean is misguided.

In July 2020, the Pew Charitable Trusts and Systemiq released a report called Breaking the Plastic Wave. Yonathan Shiran, the project director and author of an accompanying scientific study, compares cleaning up ocean plastic with mopping up a flooding house.
“First you have to turn off the source of the water,” says Shiran, “then you wipe up the floor. I do worry [cleanup efforts] are distracting us from the real solution—closing the tap.” No cleanup effort is cheaper and more effective than preventing plastic from entering the environment, the study found.
The cleanup quest is so futile, says John Hocevar, the ocean projects lead for Greenpeace USA, that he’d like to see every dollar earmarked for cleanup worldwide redirected to fixing the leaks. “We’re making the problem worse at a pace that far exceeds what we can possibly clean up,” he argues. “We need to close the tap as quickly as possible. Then I’ll be more excited to clean up the mess.”
But closing the tap may be an even more monumental task. In rich countries, cutting off the flow of plastic into the sea will require policy changes to encourage better waste management, a circular plastics industry, banning single-use plastics, and incentivizing reusable options. In poorer places, it requires all that and more widespread waste management.
People living in lower-income countries generally produce far less plastic waste per capita, but the Pew study found that two billion people are currently living without waste collection. With nowhere to put it, Shiran says, they’ll often dump their garbage in the street where rain and wind wash it into rivers, which eventually carry it to the ocean. Surveys of plastic at sea, combined with studies looking at ocean currents and drift patterns, show that more than 80 percent of the plastic in the ocean first bobbed down a river—a quarter of it down just 10 rivers, mostly in Asia. A growing population means that the number of people without garbage services will nearly double by 2040, compounding the problem. Expanding waste collection services to everyone would be nearly impossible, says Shiran.
Plastic debris tends to accumulate in a handful of key sites, such as in harbors and along beaches. Imaginechina Limited/Alamy Stock Photo
Knowing the leak is unfixable, at least for now, strengthens the argument for mopping up in the meantime.
“We don’t say, The oil spill is too big to clean up, so why bother,” says Susan Baer, the executive director and cofounder of Clear Blue Sea, a nonprofit working on a fleet of what are basically ocean-going Roombas. “Leaving that much plastic in the ocean is detrimental to human health and the health of the ocean. Every animal in the sea will eat whatever plastic it can fit in its mouth,” Baer says.
“Cleanup efforts are an important piece of the puzzle, right up until they’re not needed,” adds Chloé Dubois, cofounder of Ocean Legacy Foundation, a Canadian nonprofit that organizes beach cleanups and recycles marine debris among other activities. “They remove bigger pieces of plastic before they become impossible to clean up. They also help shift the narrative and public behavior. That’s what drives policy changes.”
So even if we are going to follow Hocevar’s lead and put as much time and money as we can into closing the plastic leak, that still leaves us in the same spot: figuring out which of the many competing cleanup efforts deserve our funding, support, and attention.
But the struggles of the Ocean Cleanup, and the realization that most plastic in the ocean—small, sunken, and degraded—is nearly impossible to collect, are insightful. Taken together, they lead us to a stance shared by many experts: that the best way to clean up the ocean is to stop trying to clean up the ocean.

After its own research showed plastic’s freshwater source, the Ocean Cleanup in 2015 diversified and started working on the Interceptor, a river boom system that funnels garbage into an anchored collection barge. The organization has installed three Interceptors: in the Klang River in Malaysia, in the Ozama River in the Dominican Republic, and in the Cengkareng drain in Indonesia. A fourth is in the works for the Mekong River in Vietnam. The organization is aiming to place an Interceptor in the 1,000 most polluted rivers by 2025.
The Ocean Cleanup’s Interceptor program recognizes the riverine source of most marine plastic waste and tries to catch it nearer to the source. Photo by Frans Blok/Alamy Stock Photo
But rivers are transportation corridors. To avoid conflicts with boats, the Interceptor only extends partway into the river. Plenty of trash slips by. When it does, it tends to collect in harbors. These sites, experts suggest, are ideal locations for concerted, targeted efforts—like the England-based Water Witch.
In the 1960s, Francis Caddick designed a boat custom made to clean up the water around the dock in Liverpool. More than 50 years later, the family-run company has evolved as marine litter has changed. “In our infancy, our vessels mostly worked clearing wood and vegetation,” says Jackie Caddick, the company director. “Now I would say a good 90 percent of what we remove is plastic, and we have developed our vessels to deal with this.”
The company’s largest dredger can skim up to a tonne of litter every three minutes, gathering up to 100 tonnes a day. Port authorities, marinas, and resort areas operate Water Witch dredgers in 200 locations worldwide.
Cleanup efforts, such as the Water Witch, that focus on key hotspots like harbors and beaches can collect plastic much more efficiently than projects focused on cleaning the open ocean. Photo by Elizabeth Leyden/Alamy Stock Photo
Another place plastic tends to accumulate is on beaches. Experts like the Ocean Legacy Foundation’s Dubois and Marcus Eriksen, the chief scientist with 5 Gyres, an environmental research organization, say that beach cleanups are another effective way to tackle the plastic problem. Cleaning shorelines may not be flashy enough to draw a lot of attention, but doing so prevents plastic that has washed ashore from returning to the ocean where it can sink to the bottom, or from degrading in the sun and breaking into tiny pieces that are impossible to clean up.
Though humble, beach cleanups have impact. Over the past 27 years, volunteers have cleaned nearly 45,000 kilometers of Canadian waterways as part of the Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup. The 2019 effort removed 160 tonnes of litter. In the northern Gulf of Alaska, a similar project, run by Gulf of Alaska Keeper, has cleaned up more than 2,400 kilometers of coastline since 2006, gathering more than 1,300 tonnes of plastic. That’s with just one crew working only during the summer. Imagine what similar efforts could do with the Ocean Cleanup’s $35-million. Even Greenpeace’s Hocevar, who favors better garbage collection over all efforts, says volunteer beach cleanups should continue, because they provide a link between the public and the plastic problem.
An even more concentrated source of plastic debris is the 500,000 to 1,000,000 tonnes of commercial fishing gear that gets lost at sea every year, says Eriksen. By weight, this ghost gear makes up a large percentage of the garbage cleaned off beaches in Alaska—up to 70 percent in one analysis—and at least 46 percent of the large plastic objects floating in the ocean, according to a study by the Ocean Cleanup. This ghost gear is especially damaging, because as well as polluting the ocean, it continues to kill marine life.
Research shows that a majority of floating plastic will, within a few years, wash up on a beach. Collecting it there prevents the plastic from breaking down or reentering the ocean. Photo by David Pereiras/Alamy Stock Photo
The good news is, compared with other industrial sources of plastic, fishing gear is fairly easy to collect or prevent from being lost. Several programs have set up free dump bins at docks to make it easier and cheaper for fishers to safely dispose of old gear. Bureo, a California-based company, buys aging nets from South American fishermen and turns them into skateboards and sunglasses. And Fishing for Litter, a program run by KIMO International, a European pollution prevention and ocean health NGO, plays to fishermen’s desire for sustainability. Since 2004, the program has encouraged commercial fishermen to gather ghost gear and other litter they find at sea and dump it in bins KIMO has set up at ports around Europe. Between 2016 and 2017, nearly 1,000 vessels gathered 470 tonnes of ocean plastics along with their catch—voluntarily.
“We’re aiming to change behavior for the long term, so that fishers are seen as part of the solution to marine litter,” says Arabelle Bentley, KIMO’s executive secretary. For fishers, she says, “it’s a feel-good factor.”
That desire to be part of the solution unites all cleanup efforts. But passion can be misplaced. The unfortunate reality is that there is no key to cleaning up the ocean. The solution is not flashy or sensational. It’s not an entrepreneur with a big idea—a person we can look to as the one who will solve the problem. It’s the boring stuff: when you use plastic, dispose of it properly. If you want to do more, help clean up a river, harbor, or beach. But really, we need to slow the flow of garbage trucks. Because right now, they’re speeding up. We are using more plastic every year. By 2050, the garbage trucks could be unloading every 15 seconds instead of every minute. We don’t have all that long before the ocean is teeming with more plastic than fish.