They may not have solved the problem, but at least they are doing something about it. In my opinion, that's better than doing nothing at all. I've seen firsthand how their solutions have been implemented and have had a positive impact on the environment. How often do we hear promises from NGOs or government entities claiming they will solve humanitarian issues such as housing shortages or hunger, only to fail miserably while spending billions of dollars in the process? Meanwhile, others grow rich from government tenders and contracts at the expense of the unfortunate beneficiaries.
The point of the article is that this intervention is actively harmful for exactly the same reasons raised by experts a long time ago.
> In my opinion, that's better than doing nothing at all.
This attitude is wrong IMO. The issue with high-profile half-baked interventions is that they distract from real unsexy solutions like grab the plastic in rivers BEFORE they make it to the ocean.
This is self-evident from data on their own website! https://theoceancleanup.com/sources/ . River mouths/estuaries are also some of the most densely populated regions in the world. This bites in that it is easy for plastic to enter the ocean. But it's also a lot easier to run cleanup at the source, next to humans, rather than 3000km away in the middle of the ocean.
My read of the article is that they’ve also pivoted to the methods experts suggest as well. The article actually phrases that in a negative way weirdly. I agree with the original comment, at least they’re trying and iterating. You get conflicting feedback from experts in all cases. At some point you have to commit and try.
> distract from real unsexy solutions like grab the plastic in rivers BEFORE they make it to the ocean.
They pivoted to mostly river cleanup (interceptors) many years ago. And they clearly show that it is just one step back, not a full time solution. Ocean cleanup is last step, river grab is the step before that and having proper garbage collection would be best.
Which is literally written in TFA:
> Now they mostly intercept plastic when it first leaves rivers and enters the ocean instead of trying to scoop it out of the middle of the ocean, though the open ocean work is still mentioned on their website
Alternatively, creating incentives for plastics to never be deposited in rivers to begin with...
"The results, published last November in Environmental Science & Technology, show that rivers collectively dump anywhere from 0.47 million to 2.75 million metric tons of plastic into the seas every year, depending on the data used in the models. The 10 rivers that carry 93 percent of that trash are the Yangtze, Yellow, Hai, Pearl, Amur, Mekong, Indus and Ganges Delta in Asia, and the Niger and Nile in Africa. The Yangtze alone dumps up to an estimated 1.5 million metric tons of plastic waste into the Yellow Sea."
Spot on. Another thing these experts fail to mention is that a lot of the data on the Pacific Garbage patch actually comes from the Ocean Cleanup, since, you know, they actually went out there to look.
>> They may not have solved the problem, but at least they are doing something about it. In my opinion, that's better than doing nothing at all.
The alternative is not "doing nothing at all." It's spending the money effectively and in ways that don't kill marine life. TFA gives an example near the end:
"So if we can’t scoop all the plastic trash out of the ocean without killing large numbers of marine animals, what can we do instead?
One effective (and cost-effective) solution is the Ocean Conservancy’s International Coastal Cleanup. This amazing program has removed more than 400 million pounds of trash from beaches, where it’s much easier to access than in the middle of the ocean, before it gets swept back to sea. They do this at incredibly low cost, because more than 19 million people around the world have volunteered to help.
“Our total annual budget for all our plastics advocacy work, which includes cleanup, science and policy efforts, is about $6 million,” says Jordana Lewis, director of communications for the Ocean Conservancy Director of Communications. “Every organization contributing to the International Coastal Cleanup does things a little differently, but for every $2 invested Ocean Conservancy can remove a pound of trash from the environment and invest in scientific research and upstream policy solutions to prevent plastics from being produced and/or entering our ocean in the first place.”
As of this writing, The Ocean Cleanup reports it has removed 117.3 million pounds of waste from the ocean and (mostly) rivers. The nonprofit spent more than $72 million across its 2022-2024 fiscal years, according to tax filings.
Meanwhile Dr. Richards points out that in 2024 Ocean Cleanup’s System 002 “was out there spewing diesel fumes from a ship that cost $100,000 a day, picking up less plastic than a bunch of volunteers on beaches.” (A representative for the Ocean Cleanup told me via email that they are working on improving the cost efficiency of their operations.)"
> They may not have solved the problem, but at least they are doing something about it. In my opinion, that's better than doing nothing at all.
TY for saying this. I am having an especially hard time right now because this is my attitude as well and it seems; even here on HN that its now cool to literally just not try. Complain, call everything AI-slop and just concede defeat to Altman, Dario and Zuck. I literally had someone tell me its stupid and pointless to try and build efficiencies into systems like Medicare etc... and we should just wait on "mind-control". At a time when the barrier to entry and the cost of just fucking trying has never been lower it seems like there are more people than ever just waiting to tear everything down and recruit you into their cult of apathetic misery.
The title of the article is kind of technically correct but still misleading.
It is true that The Ocean Cleanup "we're going to trawl the ocean for plastic" approach isn't working terribly well.
But they did pivot to stopping trash from washing out of rivers and into the ocean which is working. Stopping the mess from growing is also a very good thing.
This seems like some combination of the enemy of good is perfect and also sour grapes that someone else is doing the thing.
Read again? Negative is the enemy of good, and this project was a net negative.
As PR it went well, if you didn't examine it too closely. It was a misnomer from the start - it was 'harbor cleanup' or 'river cleanup' really. Where the big obvious plastic objects are. I don't believe they proposed any method for actually cleaning up the 'garbage patch' which consists of pepper-sized particles of plastic that requires a sieve to see. And which has been colonized by many marine creatures, so 'cleaning it up' would have the side effect of mass sterilization.
Issues are hard. PR is easy, especially if you hand-wave over the hard stuff.
"The river interceptor design was clearly based on existing solutions" like Mr. Trash Wheel, Dr. Richards says. "Rather than work with the organizations who had successfully been removing trash from rivers for years, they ‘reinvented’ a similar design, at a much higher cost, and claimed to be innovators."
This is a great summary of lots of flashy commercial and non-profit work. Proposal for a product: AI-assisted "Who is already doing this?" database. Extra credit for linking to audited annual reports.
Reminds me of the endless "12 year old wins $25k young innovator award for inventing a solar panel that can go on the roof of an EV to charge while you drive!" type proclamations
Once plastic is in the middle of the ocean, it's game over. Much better to invest in reducing plastic use in the first place all those one-time-use plastics and invest in developing and improving recycling of the plastic.
Germany, for example, has facilities that can automatically sort plastic both by type and color, which is quite impressive.
> automatically sort plastic both by type and color, which is quite impressive
.... I am sorry, but how can that impress you? That would be impressive in 1990. Today, with deep learning and all AI, I would consider having robots open trash bags and sort whatever is inside for more processing (e.g. organic waste, plastic and so on, depending on how dirty it is) only slightly impressive. Unlike Amazon pick up challange, they don't need to be perfect.
The plastic devouring bacteria breeding program is going very well. Typing this on a phone that dissolves as we speak. As if a million million-sided dice are thrown in unison, always landing on the six-up - a thousand times in a row to get through a labyrinth.
Yeah it'll be great when plastic starts to rot like wood. Thank god we haven't spent the last 60 years using plastic as a water proof electrical insulator.
Ocean Cleanup is still hard at it cleaning major plastic emissions sources worldwide. I'm surprised they're still going and that they've managed to scale into different modalities of mass cleaning. Sure, it's not cleaning the world or placing consumer deposit on all plastic, but they're doing significant good.
As long as we're using natural gas, there be a surplus of cheap ethane and we'll indirectly subsidize plastic, since making plastic out of the ethane puts that waste product to use (by creating plastic waste instead).
I know it's fashionable to blame capitalism for everything which is wrong with the world but it's the people and governments who don't care about the pollution and think that's it's fine to throw garbage on the ground or in the river instead of disposing it properly. Soviet Union did a fair amount of damage to the environment not being a capitalist country.
it wasn't that long ago that most daily use goods were sold in reusable glass bottles, jars, paper bags. Clothes, shoes, appliances, furniture was durable, lasting multiple years, sometimes even passed on between generations. Then, late stage capitalism decided to optimize the hell out of everything, told us that glass is too heavy for economic distribution of goods, paper not hygienic enough and that we need internet enabled toasters. We now end up drowning in plastics, forced to replace cars, heavy appliances every 2 years but most of all are seeking weird solutions and feel good stories to solve this, well in line with the principle of the orphan crushing machine.
Sometimes is crazy how deluded people can be on all this safe the planet initiatives... All you have to do to figure out whos contributing the most with the whole plastic in the sea is go a beach and see what plastic do you see... maybe in a few hours walk you collect about 2 shopping bags of coke bottles, the other 2 tons you cant carry is all fishing industry discarded gear.
Cleaning the ocean, yeah right... tackle the fishing industry first.
They may not have solved the problem, but at least they are doing something about it. In my opinion, that's better than doing nothing at all. I've seen firsthand how their solutions have been implemented and have had a positive impact on the environment. How often do we hear promises from NGOs or government entities claiming they will solve humanitarian issues such as housing shortages or hunger, only to fail miserably while spending billions of dollars in the process? Meanwhile, others grow rich from government tenders and contracts at the expense of the unfortunate beneficiaries.
The point of the article is that this intervention is actively harmful for exactly the same reasons raised by experts a long time ago.
> In my opinion, that's better than doing nothing at all.
This attitude is wrong IMO. The issue with high-profile half-baked interventions is that they distract from real unsexy solutions like grab the plastic in rivers BEFORE they make it to the ocean.
This is self-evident from data on their own website! https://theoceancleanup.com/sources/ . River mouths/estuaries are also some of the most densely populated regions in the world. This bites in that it is easy for plastic to enter the ocean. But it's also a lot easier to run cleanup at the source, next to humans, rather than 3000km away in the middle of the ocean.
My read of the article is that they’ve also pivoted to the methods experts suggest as well. The article actually phrases that in a negative way weirdly. I agree with the original comment, at least they’re trying and iterating. You get conflicting feedback from experts in all cases. At some point you have to commit and try.
> distract from real unsexy solutions like grab the plastic in rivers BEFORE they make it to the ocean.
They pivoted to mostly river cleanup (interceptors) many years ago. And they clearly show that it is just one step back, not a full time solution. Ocean cleanup is last step, river grab is the step before that and having proper garbage collection would be best.
Which is literally written in TFA:
> Now they mostly intercept plastic when it first leaves rivers and enters the ocean instead of trying to scoop it out of the middle of the ocean, though the open ocean work is still mentioned on their website
Alternatively, creating incentives for plastics to never be deposited in rivers to begin with...
"The results, published last November in Environmental Science & Technology, show that rivers collectively dump anywhere from 0.47 million to 2.75 million metric tons of plastic into the seas every year, depending on the data used in the models. The 10 rivers that carry 93 percent of that trash are the Yangtze, Yellow, Hai, Pearl, Amur, Mekong, Indus and Ganges Delta in Asia, and the Niger and Nile in Africa. The Yangtze alone dumps up to an estimated 1.5 million metric tons of plastic waste into the Yellow Sea."
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/stemming-the-plas...
What evidence is there that people would start funding river clean up if they stopped funding in-ocean initiatives?
Well, when I talk about fixing the core issues with JavaScript, these days people say "why bother, just paper it over at the TS layer..."
Perfect is the enemy of good.
I think the Ocean Cleanup has been one of the most effective (non- political/commercial) PR campaigns of the last decade.
Spot on. Another thing these experts fail to mention is that a lot of the data on the Pacific Garbage patch actually comes from the Ocean Cleanup, since, you know, they actually went out there to look.
>> They may not have solved the problem, but at least they are doing something about it. In my opinion, that's better than doing nothing at all.
The alternative is not "doing nothing at all." It's spending the money effectively and in ways that don't kill marine life. TFA gives an example near the end:
"So if we can’t scoop all the plastic trash out of the ocean without killing large numbers of marine animals, what can we do instead?
One effective (and cost-effective) solution is the Ocean Conservancy’s International Coastal Cleanup. This amazing program has removed more than 400 million pounds of trash from beaches, where it’s much easier to access than in the middle of the ocean, before it gets swept back to sea. They do this at incredibly low cost, because more than 19 million people around the world have volunteered to help.
“Our total annual budget for all our plastics advocacy work, which includes cleanup, science and policy efforts, is about $6 million,” says Jordana Lewis, director of communications for the Ocean Conservancy Director of Communications. “Every organization contributing to the International Coastal Cleanup does things a little differently, but for every $2 invested Ocean Conservancy can remove a pound of trash from the environment and invest in scientific research and upstream policy solutions to prevent plastics from being produced and/or entering our ocean in the first place.”
As of this writing, The Ocean Cleanup reports it has removed 117.3 million pounds of waste from the ocean and (mostly) rivers. The nonprofit spent more than $72 million across its 2022-2024 fiscal years, according to tax filings.
Meanwhile Dr. Richards points out that in 2024 Ocean Cleanup’s System 002 “was out there spewing diesel fumes from a ship that cost $100,000 a day, picking up less plastic than a bunch of volunteers on beaches.” (A representative for the Ocean Cleanup told me via email that they are working on improving the cost efficiency of their operations.)"
> They may not have solved the problem, but at least they are doing something about it. In my opinion, that's better than doing nothing at all.
TY for saying this. I am having an especially hard time right now because this is my attitude as well and it seems; even here on HN that its now cool to literally just not try. Complain, call everything AI-slop and just concede defeat to Altman, Dario and Zuck. I literally had someone tell me its stupid and pointless to try and build efficiencies into systems like Medicare etc... and we should just wait on "mind-control". At a time when the barrier to entry and the cost of just fucking trying has never been lower it seems like there are more people than ever just waiting to tear everything down and recruit you into their cult of apathetic misery.
NGOs don't "fail miserably" - their actual goal is laundering tax money, and they very much do succeed!
The title of the article is kind of technically correct but still misleading.
It is true that The Ocean Cleanup "we're going to trawl the ocean for plastic" approach isn't working terribly well.
But they did pivot to stopping trash from washing out of rivers and into the ocean which is working. Stopping the mess from growing is also a very good thing.
This seems like some combination of the enemy of good is perfect and also sour grapes that someone else is doing the thing.
Read again? Negative is the enemy of good, and this project was a net negative. As PR it went well, if you didn't examine it too closely. It was a misnomer from the start - it was 'harbor cleanup' or 'river cleanup' really. Where the big obvious plastic objects are. I don't believe they proposed any method for actually cleaning up the 'garbage patch' which consists of pepper-sized particles of plastic that requires a sieve to see. And which has been colonized by many marine creatures, so 'cleaning it up' would have the side effect of mass sterilization.
Issues are hard. PR is easy, especially if you hand-wave over the hard stuff.
They're still doing ocean cleanup, too. Getting the fishing equipment out of the water is a huge improvement.
"The river interceptor design was clearly based on existing solutions" like Mr. Trash Wheel, Dr. Richards says. "Rather than work with the organizations who had successfully been removing trash from rivers for years, they ‘reinvented’ a similar design, at a much higher cost, and claimed to be innovators."
This is a great summary of lots of flashy commercial and non-profit work. Proposal for a product: AI-assisted "Who is already doing this?" database. Extra credit for linking to audited annual reports.
Reminds me of the endless "12 year old wins $25k young innovator award for inventing a solar panel that can go on the roof of an EV to charge while you drive!" type proclamations
And extra extra credit for NGOs (and startups) that openly advertise "competitors".
Once plastic is in the middle of the ocean, it's game over. Much better to invest in reducing plastic use in the first place all those one-time-use plastics and invest in developing and improving recycling of the plastic.
Germany, for example, has facilities that can automatically sort plastic both by type and color, which is quite impressive.
> automatically sort plastic both by type and color, which is quite impressive
.... I am sorry, but how can that impress you? That would be impressive in 1990. Today, with deep learning and all AI, I would consider having robots open trash bags and sort whatever is inside for more processing (e.g. organic waste, plastic and so on, depending on how dirty it is) only slightly impressive. Unlike Amazon pick up challange, they don't need to be perfect.
The plastic devouring bacteria breeding program is going very well. Typing this on a phone that dissolves as we speak. As if a million million-sided dice are thrown in unison, always landing on the six-up - a thousand times in a row to get through a labyrinth.
Yeah it'll be great when plastic starts to rot like wood. Thank god we haven't spent the last 60 years using plastic as a water proof electrical insulator.
Sympathetic to other strategies but that writeup is wholly unconvincing. It comes across as astroturf.
Sources of ocean plastic https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Global-emissions-of-plas...
> The Ocean Cleanup didn’t work, for the reasons experts said it wouldn’t. What can we learn from this?
Listen to experts. At least they recognize the "I told you so".
Ocean Cleanup is still hard at it cleaning major plastic emissions sources worldwide. I'm surprised they're still going and that they've managed to scale into different modalities of mass cleaning. Sure, it's not cleaning the world or placing consumer deposit on all plastic, but they're doing significant good.
It’s capitalism. The market has determined that plastic in the ocean is the most efficient way to produce goods and services.
it's largely because it's being dumped or littered instead of being disposed in a garbage can.
It's also chemistry.
As long as we're using natural gas, there be a surplus of cheap ethane and we'll indirectly subsidize plastic, since making plastic out of the ethane puts that waste product to use (by creating plastic waste instead).
I know it's fashionable to blame capitalism for everything which is wrong with the world but it's the people and governments who don't care about the pollution and think that's it's fine to throw garbage on the ground or in the river instead of disposing it properly. Soviet Union did a fair amount of damage to the environment not being a capitalist country.
it wasn't that long ago that most daily use goods were sold in reusable glass bottles, jars, paper bags. Clothes, shoes, appliances, furniture was durable, lasting multiple years, sometimes even passed on between generations. Then, late stage capitalism decided to optimize the hell out of everything, told us that glass is too heavy for economic distribution of goods, paper not hygienic enough and that we need internet enabled toasters. We now end up drowning in plastics, forced to replace cars, heavy appliances every 2 years but most of all are seeking weird solutions and feel good stories to solve this, well in line with the principle of the orphan crushing machine.
Sometimes is crazy how deluded people can be on all this safe the planet initiatives... All you have to do to figure out whos contributing the most with the whole plastic in the sea is go a beach and see what plastic do you see... maybe in a few hours walk you collect about 2 shopping bags of coke bottles, the other 2 tons you cant carry is all fishing industry discarded gear.
Cleaning the ocean, yeah right... tackle the fishing industry first.