According to this website (https://www.condorferries.co.uk/plastic-in-the-ocean-statistics) 33 billion pounds of plastic enter the ocean each year.
So in the same timeframe that ocean cleanup extracted 25,000 pounds, 2.5 billion pounds were dumped.
I'm not saying its not a worthwhile exercise, but that's depressing.
Your article is a bit misleading with the mixing of denominations.
This article says they got about 50 tons in a month, so ~600 tons a year.
There's ~100-200 million tons of plastic in the ocean now, with a further 14 million tons being added every year (33 billion pounds in metric tons).
14 million tons at 600 removed a year for 1 boat is 23k years. But at 23k boats that's 1 year. There are about 6k shipping monstrosities out on the oceans at any given time, 50k ships navigate the oceans every year.
If we increase the yield of these boats by just 2 fold, these numbers start making sense to fix within a lifetime, which is amazing. Without counting the reduction in waste added we can easily fix.
Humanity should have expected the cleanup to take as many generations if not more than it took to put plastic in, we're lucky we can get this close.
This is not greenwashing.
of note, the more they clean up, the less efficient their clean process will be since the concentration/abundance of trash will reduce.
On the other hand, as more time passes the technology involved in ocean cleanup may improve.
Future kids will figure it out.
...if we don't go extinct.
Ocean cleanup is also working on systems to prevent plastic from leaving rivers and flowing into the oceans.
And they took it to a local garbage dump, which then got shipped off to China, and then thrown right back into the ocean.
25000pounds = 11339.8 kg
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