Oops! Cleaning the Great Pacific Garbage Patch was probably a bad idea
Last month, a group of marine biologists noticed something fishy in a video posted on Twitter by a nonprofit called The Ocean Cleanup. “This is likely a staged video,” Clark Richards, a scientist at the Bedford Institute of Oceanography, wrote. “I call bullshit.” In the 25-second clip, a large net appears to dump 8,400 pounds of plastic waste, including crates, buckets, and fishing gear, onto the deck of a ship. The Ocean Cleanup, which has raised more than $100 million on the promise to rid plastic from the seas, said the trash in the video was just pulled from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch — an infamous region in international waters, between California and Hawaii, that’s polluted with plastic waste. >click to read< 10:23
Just a scam. I’ve been there and seen for myself and most of the garbage patch is invisible to the naked eye it’s so microscopic until gleaned into small mesh nets. When the cleaners target the bigger stuff it loads up at the back of the weir and just flops over to the other side of it. Doesn’t work in any wind or against the current. If you get enough ignorant do gooders paying into something, it does create jobs, though.