We have a name for a net dragged between two boats, and that’s trawl fishing.” Miriam Goldstein, the director of the Center for American Progress’s ocean policy told Earther in an interview “They spent I don’t know how many tens of millions of dollars to invent fishing,” adding that the Jenny is basically “a net dragged between two boats. Not only that but Slat’s system also has escape routes and even lights to help guide disoriented animals to find their way out of the net to safety. Of course, as twitch any large venture, some detractors point out that the nets are harming wildlife, as sea creatures of any size can become caught in them.īut The Ocean Cleanup answers that claim by stating that the slow-moving Jenny poses very little of a threat to animals since it goes at a snail’s pace at 1.5 knots – so slowly that most sealife can easily move away from it. After workers empty out their haul onto the ships, the plastics are taken back to California for recycling. Guided by two boats, the Jenny’s funnel-shaped net captures plastics both large and small in its grip. 24 trillion pounds of plastics reach world’s oceans every year But that was how large it needed to be, Slat and his team believed, to be able to have much of an impact on the Path, which covers an estimated 1.6 million square kilometers (617,763 square miles), which is approximately three times the size of France. The use of nets in and of itself can be harmful to wildlife as they can become caught in them and die after not being able to free themselves.Īnd the net used in this effort is indeed gigantic, as befits the nature of its mission, at a half-mile in length. The only way to combat such a large problem was clearly to pick it up physically - but therein lay another problem. While the floating debris is not dense enough to be picked up by satellites, oceanographers noted its existence years ago. The plastics picked up by the enormous net were sometimes as large as plastic bottles, but there are pieces of plastic smaller than a grain of rice that are also part of the Patch – and since they can be ingested by fish and other wildlife, they can pose an even greater problem to sealife. Now, Slat says, he hopes to be able to remove 90 percent of floating ocean plastics by the year 2040. Slat hopes to remove 90 resent of plastic flotsam by 2040 The Ocean Cleanup’s next attempt to clean the Patch was slightly more successful, as it did bring in some of the debris but it wasn’t efficient enough to have much of an impact, according to Smithsonian Magazine.īut the 2021 version of the Jenny, pulled by a gigantic Maersk ship, has fulfilled Slat’s dreams of removing a great deal of trash in an economically feasible way, making a dent in the plastic garbage in the Patch. The trash collection device basically consists of giant nets bordered by floats.īeing dragged behind what is in essence a gigantic trawler, the net system used in 2018 was prone to breakage as it sifted out debris from the surface and he upper water column of the sea. This recent trash hauling effort was the first successful such foray by The Ocean Cleanup, which had set out from San Francisco last year to haul away plastics before it suffered a “systems failure,” according to Slat, as it was buffeted by pounding waves. But the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is in a league of its own not only as the world’s largest body of water, but in regards to the amount of garbage floating on it as well, and as Slat estimates, it might take ten vessels dragging Jennys behind it to rid it of its unsightly burden.
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