Shocking images have revealed the world’s largest garbage dump, comprising 100,000 metric tons of everything from discarded refrigerators to children’s toys.
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch spans 620,000 square miles, an area twice the size of Texas, and most of the trash comes from China, Japan, Korea and the United States.
The pile of aquatic trash was first detected 1,200 miles west of California in 1997 and has since spread across the ocean, threatening marine life and releasing toxic microplastics into the atmosphere.
However, since 2019, the non-profit organization Ocean Cleanup has been on a mission to change this through a $189 million project with the goal of conquering the artificial float in the next 10 years.
“We’ll get it out of the ocean while we can,” the charity’s head of environmental and social affairs, Matthias Egger, told DailyMail.com. “What we’re really doing is avoiding an ecological time bomb.”
Shocking drone footage has revealed the world’s largest garbage dump from above, comprising 100,000 metric tons of everything from discarded refrigerators to children’s toys.
Egger said the Ocean Cleanup was ideated by diver Boyan Slat several years ago, who founded the nonprofit after becoming frustrated finding “more plastic than fish” in the beautiful waters of the Mediterranean.
They started first with the world’s largest pile of waterborne trash, known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
For the first few years, they focused on developing innovative technology that can clean areas the size of a football field every five seconds.
The machine, known as System 3, nicknamed “Josh” by developers, extracts foreign objects from the ocean without harming natural marine life swimming in the same area.
“The System 3 machine, which is 1.4 miles long, funnels all the plastic into what looks like a large bag,” Egger told DailyMail.com.
When asked how the machine manages to scrape the ocean for debris and leave the tiny fish unharmed, Egger added: “That’s the challenging part.
‘When we developed the first version of the machine, we asked fishermen: “If you had to produce the worst possible fishing net, how would you do it?”
Known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the giant pile of plastic spans 620,000 square miles, an area twice the size of Texas.
The floating trash pile was first detected 1,200 miles west of California in 1997 and has since spread across the ocean, threatening marine life and releasing toxic microplastics into the atmosphere.
Since 2019, the non-profit organization Ocean Cleanup has been on a mission to change this through a $189 million project that aims to conquer the artificial ocean monster in the next 10 years.
Egger explained that the system was designed to have large escape routes for marine life that can swim to the bottom, without losing any of the plastic that tends to float to the surface.
He added that it is also programmed to emit a sound that repels marine life, including dolphins and whales, so that they are not in danger of approaching.
“Even if an animal enters the system, there are holes and it can breathe before it finds an escape route,” he said.
Egger added that teams use a “plastic forecast” each day to determine where the “hot spots” are based on ocean movements and weather conditions.
He said a whopping 80 percent of the trash is discarded fishing equipment from developed countries, mainly China, Korea, Japan and the United States.
“We used to think that most of the plastic found in the ocean comes from land,” Egger told DailyMail.com.
“But what we did find is that most of the plastic that reaches the ocean from land remains very close to the river and on the beaches.”
“You sometimes hear in the media that plastic pollution comes from developing countries that lack the infrastructure to properly dispose of things,” he added.
“But we are finding that most of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is made up of items from highly industrialized countries.”
Egger said most plastic taken from the ocean can be recycled, and Ocean Cleanup has partnered with Korean car producer Kia, which uses the trash to build electric vehicles.
The charity’s Head of Environmental and Social Affairs, Matthias Egger, explained that the system was designed to have large escape routes for marine life, which can swim to the bottom, without losing any of the plastic that tends to float to the bottom. surface.
Egger said the Ocean Cleanup was conceived by diver Boyan Slat several years ago, who founded the nonprofit after becoming frustrated finding “more plastic than fish” in the beautiful waters of the Mediterranean.
Egger said the “biggest problem” posed by ocean trash arises when it begins to break down into toxic microplastics.
“They’re so small, they go everywhere,” Egger said. ‘They enter the fish, they go into the air, they go into the water… and they are very difficult to eliminate.
‘Much of the oxygen we breathe comes from the ocean. Microplastics in the air also cause faster climate change.’
Egger said most plastic taken from the ocean can be recycled, and Ocean Cleanup has partnered with Korean car producer Kia, which uses the trash to make electric vehicles.
He said that in the future the large-scale data collection effort behind the scenes of the cleanup could help hold countries accountable to their green commitments by tracking their waste production, while “buying us time” in the crisis. climate.
Recently, an international group of scientists discovered a waterborne fungus that chews up trash, as detailed in a new study published in the journal Total Environmental Science.
The fungus was discovered among the rustling layers of other microbes living in the suspended plastic pile, and is only the fourth known marine fungus capable of consuming plastic waste.
