Most Ocean Plastic Flows From Rivers. Can Giant Trash Barriers Stop It? | World Wide Waste

in 2012 a teenager came up with an ambitious plan to eliminate plastic in the ocean boy and slat wanted to harness natural currents to collect floating debris inside a giant u-shaped barrier I believe the Great Pacific Garbage Patch can completely clean itself in just five years that timeline didn't work out and there's still a garbage trucks worth of plastic entering the ocean every minute on average

but the ocean cleanup has made progress the nonprofit has removed more than 200 metric tons of trash from the Pacific many people said that it couldn't be done that it was a Fool's era and a pipe dream but to really make a dent in plastic pollution the organization's going closer to the source most ocean plastic comes from Rivers so the Dutch entrepreneur invented these big machines

that capture waste before it ever makes it to open Waters rivers are the the arteries that carry the trash from land to Sea they're called interceptors and the founder plans to deploy a thousand of them but some experts worry these machines could strip rivers and oceans of things that are supposed to be there too so can a network of trash barriers claim the world's most polluted

Rivers and our cleaner Rivers the key to a plastic free ocean [Music] the Rio Osama in the Dominican Republic flows into the Caribbean Sea it's one of the dirtiest rivers in the world and Carmen Encarnacion has lived nearby for 24 years the ocean cleanup installed an Interceptor about a mile down the river from her home in 2020. contamination the idea is to let the current do

most of the work as trash travels Downstream this 700 foot long arm redirects it toward the machine's opening so at the barriers they let the water pass but they stop everything that's floating on the roof we have the solar panels that are connected to batteries which store the energy so that even at night we can keep intercepting lessons conveyor belts carry the waste to one of

six dumpsters they can fill up in just three days during the rainy season a lot of today's Haul is plants and in this case that's probably not a bad thing these are invasive water hyacinths they grow naturally in the Amazon but over the past Century humans have introduced them to new places where they don't have any predators like the Osama River where they're taking over blocking

light and oxygen and killing plants and animals beneath them the plant tends to thrive in polluted water and its roots cling to trash is nearby factories and Farms have used this River as a Dumping Ground for decades but in Santo Domingo many people who live in the osama's banks depend on it for drinking water a lot of them also have limited options for dealing with waste

it has to do with urban planning and if it's communities here don't have the the access roads for the trucks to come in so some locals dump their trash and drainage ditches called Canadas so right behind me we have the Canada bonavides it's one of the worst Canadas we have here in the Osama River just like the rivers are the arteries that take the plastic to

the ocean these Canadas here are the arteries that take the plastic to the river the ocean cleanup estimates the Osama carries up to 22 000 metric tons of plastic into the Caribbean Sea each year the nonprofit has 10 other interceptors in rivers around the globe the devices can't remove all types of pollution like chemicals or plastic that doesn't float and until residents have more options for

us by the end of the year they should be owning the Interceptor once that happens the ocean cleanup will shift its focus to other rivers like the real motabua in Guatemala which the nonprofit says might have more plastic than any other in the world in Guatemala there's so much trash coming down the river that these machines would be filled within a few seconds so there again

we have a different type of Interceptor the nonprofit built an Interceptor fence to catch plastic in a flash flood zone that flows into the river every river is unique you really need to adapt it to the specific circumstances of that River the fence let some Plastics through but Boyne expects to have an updated Interceptor by the end of 2023. meanwhile the founder hasn't given up on

his initial dream ing the Great Pacific Garbage Patch [Music] he founded the ocean Cleanup in 2013 and a decade later the patch is still growing One Challenge is that it isn't really a patch it's actually two swirling clouds of debris which often aren't visible on the surface natural currents have created Five whirlpools like it around the world Paul gyre's and each one collects trash the non-profit

is working on cleaning up the North Pacific gyre using this thing it's a flexible barrier stretched between two ships with a shallow screen hanging off the idea is to consolidate floated plastic making it easier to collect about once a week the ocean cleanup says in total it's removed more than 200 metric tons of plastic from the Pacific gyre yet it's only about two tenths of a

percent of all the plastic that might be floating here the team is working on a system three times bigger than this one which should be ready sometime in 2023 some researchers worry these cleaning machines can disrupt ecosystems by scooping up living things along with trash the ocean cleanup says the screen creates a downward flow that carries living creatures under it but the system still catches some

fish crabs Barnacles and other animals the nonprofit says it's continually fine-tuning the device to try to keep creatures out but it's impossible to avoid them completely that's partially because sea life is all mixed up with the plastic and can even live right on it sea urchins sea stars pretty much anything that you can imagine you can also find on these plastic floats there's a lot of

organisms that also attach their eggs to these floating Plastics some critics say the whole idea of passively harvesting plastic is risky once it is in the ocean it is connected with marine life it's too late to remove it a potential alternative is targeting clusters of trash instead of sweeping the whole gyre plastic in the open ocean tends to form these plastic dust bunnies at Sea collecting

the plastic debris is also pretty easy once it's plumped into these dust bunnies because then you have a single targeted area with an extremely high amount of plastic those clumps are mostly fishing gear which does the most damage by focusing on things like ghost gear which are really really dangerous to marine life you're collecting the most harmful plastic out of the ocean not necessarily collecting some

of the less harmful plastic things like laundry baskets or buckets which may have a lot of life growing on them the ocean cleanup says that in the long run its ocean systems will be more scalable than manual cleaning when it comes to its River cleanup experts were more optimistic I loved it in the diagrams how it sort of funnels it in I was like that is

so perfect once it's in the ocean it's a problem that that really becomes much harder to manage that tracks with buoyance results as of April 2023 his team has collected more than 10 times as much plastic from Rivers as from the ocean in Santo Domingo members of the Dominican Navy empty the dumpsters and send the hall to the ducasa landfill of course landfill is not ideal

but at least it's a million times better than it flowing into the ocean Boeing says the river Plastics can't be recycled as easily as the ones from the ocean it's much more of a mix and also it's much more polluted so you have sewage water that's often in these Rivers ultimately restoring a polluted ecosystem requires big changes the best way to keep plastic out of rivers

and oceans is to make less of it everybody can do something but we also need the companies to do their part this needs to be a collaboration between all sectors of society in the meantime Carmen does what she can to clean up her own neighborhood in her free time she collects water hyacinths and transforms them into art anymore she dries the plane and weaves it into

hats bags and more decorations much like plastic the plant can be useful but Carmen still wants to see it gone this is foreign [Music]