One underappreciated fact about the ocean plastic problem is that plastic pollution is persistent in some places but not in others.
For most of the world's oceans, plastic only persists for a few weeks or months before ending up back on land. In our models, we see that 80% leaves the ocean again within a month and 97% within a year.
What this means is that, when we reduce the amount of plastic flowing into the ocean, we should see an almost immediate reduction in the amount of plastic in the ocean.
It also means that most plastic pollution you see is hyper-local. Unlike something like CO₂, countries and cities therefore have a "selfish" incentive to curb their plastic emissions. For example, want to eliminate plastic pollution in Bali's waters and coastlines? Then stop plastic from leaking from Bali's towns and cities!
Another consequence is that, for most of the world's oceans, there is no need to sweep the ocean surface; it cleanses itself once we stop putting new waste in.
The exception to this is the ocean garbage patches, where currents trap the plastic and keep the trash away from coastlines, preventing it from washing up.
This is why The Ocean Cleanup employs a two-pronged approach: intercepting plastic in rivers to stop inflow and cleaning up the legacy pollution in the ocean garbage patches.
This piece of fake Lego was the first piece of plastic we ever collected from the Rio Motagua.
In early 2022, we took a tour along the whole length of the river to look for good deployment locations, when I spotted something small and red in the corner of my eye and decided to keep it as a souvenir. We’ve since extracted more than 4000 truckloads of trash from this river.
I still keep this brick in my living room as a reminder that anything big starts small.
For the first time, we can put a price tag on cleaning up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. We now call upon the world - governments, companies, individuals - to make this cleanup happen.
📢 I'm so stoked to announce that today, 🔮 https://t.co/iGnUctRH0s - the brand new, official @tan_stack React Query course - is live and available for everyone 🎉
This Wednesday, we will livestream our 100th plastic extraction from start to finish directly from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch via @Starlink on our YouTube channel and here on X.
🐦⬛ corvu's resizable component is live! 🎉
▪ Unstyled, accessible and fully customizable
▪ Nestable, with intersectable resize handles
▪ Alt key resize mode like in VS Code
▪ Extensive API for full control
https://t.co/Mq42Juq0Gu
Let's walk through some of its features! 🧵
BREAKING: We just made our largest ever plastic catch. Interceptor 006 in the Rio Las Vacas, Guatemala, stopped 272 truckloads of trash - equal to 1.4 million kg (3.1 million lbs) - from flowing into the Caribbean Sea. All in a single evening.
@1Password Thanks for your reply. Now that you mention it, I remember being asked to save "Sign in with" after sign-in. However, saving credentials after sign-in does not seem to work. Am I doing something wrong?
The @1Password browser extension allows you to save a login before submitting the form. Is there a way to save it after submitting the form? If I am unsure about the password it doesn‘t make sense for me to save the login yet because I might have to change it manually afterwards.
The Ocean Cleanup is a non-profit organization on a mission to rid the world's oceans of plastic, funded solely through donations.
Every single piece of the 9,223,483 kg of trash (over 20 million lbs) we've cleaned up so far is thanks to individuals like you.
Now, you can also easily fundraise for cleaner oceans: https://t.co/CFR0LmKGgu.
We are now deployed in 7 out of the 11 streams that flow through Jamaica's capital.
Once Interceptors go live in the remaining 4 streams later this year, Kingston will become the first city to have completely tackled its plastic leakage!
Video:
https://t.co/tpdoCgvY5f
Final two river deployments of the year - Interceptors 013 and 014 in Jamaica - and now we have 7 Interceptors in Kingston's gullies stopping trash from entering the Caribbean Sea. 🇯🇲
@jh3yy I have been waiting for the code of that :has()-bear ever since you posted that teaser. I love it so much. Did I misunderstand your post or do you still intend to share the code sometime?