Coasts key for ‘garbage patch’ clean up
26 Jan 2016 by Evoluted New Media
The best way to clean up plastic waste in the ocean is to place plastic collectors near coasts, according to scientists from Imperial College.
The best way to clean up plastic waste in the ocean is to place plastic collectors near coasts, according to scientists from Imperial College.
The Great Pacific garbage patch is a large area of microplastics and is the focus of an ongoing environmental clean-up project. Now, researchers claim the best way to solve plastic waste in the sea is to use floating barriers and platforms to concentrate and collect the waste.
Lead researcher, Dr Erik van Sebille, from Imperial College said: “It makes sense to remove plastics where they first enter the ocean around dense coastal economic and population centres. Also, you can remove plastics before they have had a chance to do any harm. Plastics in the patch have travelled a long way and potentially already done a lot of harm."
Along with Peter Sherman, also from Imperial, Dr van Sebille used a model of ocean plastic movements to predict the best place to position the plastic collectors. When running a simulated collection period between 2015 – 2025, they predicted that computed plastic collectors, especially those focused around China and Indonesian islands, would remove more than 30% of microplastics. When placed directly in the Pacific garbage patch, this dropped to 17% of microplastics being removed.
Sherman said: “The Great Pacific garbage patch has a huge mass of microplastics, but the largest flow of plastics is actually off the coasts, where it enters the oceans.”
The simulation also suggested areas where microplastics interacted with phytoplankton, often eaten by ocean creatures, decreased by almost 50% after placing collectors near coasts compared to a 14% reduction when placed in the patch. Previous research by Dr van Sebille, showed more than 90% of seabirds have swallowed plastics, highlighting the effect these plastic collectors could have on ecosystems near the sea.
Sherman added: “We need to clean up ocean plastics, and ultimately this should be achieved by stopping the source of pollution, but this will not happen overnight, so a temporary solution is needed, and clean-up projects could be it, if they are done well.”
The research was published in Environmental Research Letters.
