Garbage Trucks to Troll the High Seas for Plastic Debris
Here’s a real shifting baseline. Fishing catches may be decreasing, but inadvertent ocean litter pickups of mostly plastic debris are increasing. Fishermen don’t actually go out looking for plastic debris to pick up. These ocean garbage pick-ups are accidental. For now.
But soon, fishermen may be paid to bring garbage back to port.
Already, ocean garbage levels are damaging fishing catches. Dealing with garbage is now costing fishermen an ever increasing amount of time.
Everyone has read different estimates of the size of the giant plastic trash dump now swirling in the Pacific. The Air France crash added evidence of just how big of a problem ocean litter is becoming when ocean trash was mistaken for crash debris.
Currently several organizations are starting to pick up ocean litter:
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Fishing For Litter, Green Ocean and the NOAA are in the ocean garbage business
Fishing for litter is a simple idea. Participating vessels are given large tough garbage bags to collect marine litter that gets in their nets. It has set up harbors so fishermen can dump garbage caught in their nets to get it out of the sea. Harbours sort it for disposal. Most of it is manmade.
Green Ocean in Italy has begun paying fishermen to bring back plastic waste. The group then recycles the plastic. Some of the waste is not plastic debris but protein waste - other fish entangled in nets by mistake. This waste might soon be separated out to make bio - energy.
The U.S. NOAA is also cautiously putting out feelers to would-be ocean garbage pickup companies with ecological solutions on how to clean up our oceans, while not further damaging ocean life.
Even now, you may not have noticed, but trash already does get picked up from landlocked waterways under garbage pickup contracts with local municipal organizations, by small vessels like the U.K.’s Pollution Hunter, pictured, or the U.S. Trash Cart.
But the open ocean is where the problem is worst. Organizations are beginning to actually pay someone to go out and pick up oceanic garbage.
Humanities little garbage problem is something we need to solve if we can just decide who should pay for it.
Now that so many shipping vessels are docked due to lowered productivity worldwide is a good time to clean up after ourselves. One way or another we might wind up with routine garbage pickups in the oceans, like we now have in cities worldwide.
I think the fishing boats who make a profit off our ocean bounty should pick up garbage on their return for free as a community service.
Hi. Thank you for this post, I’m glad to see someone writing about this topic. Truck like boat? Great! It really help our environment to maintain the cleanliness of it. Great post! Excellent discussion on this article. Thank you to your post. Goodbye. Have a nice day.
Hi SK!
when I arived in Santa Barbara in mid-early 60’s, there was someone who rigged a Higgins Boat (those flat-bottom pieces of Normandy invasion) with a set of collecting shears, and was commonly seen in local waters clipping agar-agar rich sea weed, which, I was told, was sold to LA chemists.
The idea is to have similar boats collecting ocean garbage; as it is too far from land, they will take it to mother-ships, which then would receive the shit load, so to speak, and bring it to land to be treated and properly disposed of.
I have not made any cost calculations but, for sure, this is not a cheap operation, however, do we want our seas clean or not?
Look at Rio de Janeiro’s Bay of Guanabara: it is taking over twenty years to have it cleaned and so far very little accomplished to this day when the whole town will be hosting Olympics only seven years from now…
When young I used to look at the Bay’s entrance and ask my mother what were those dark things jumping there, to what she answered me: Flat Head Dolphins, locally known as Boto. I can tell you for a fact, there are very few Botos living there now…
Just imagine amidst the Pacific Ocean and in other areas where it is known that garbage reigns, just imagine…
Good luck in your wishful efforts.
Geraldo
*(writing from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)
PS if you read this, send me some feedback, plz.