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Newsela | Tiny Pacific island has no humans but gets much of world's plastic trash

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The Pacific's Henderson Island might well be renamed Plastic Island due to its overwhelming collection of garbage.

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When the oceanographer Charles Moore first discovered the Great Pacific Garbage Patch-an area of the ocean where currents concentrate the plastic we throw into the ocean-in 1997, he was shocked by its magnitude and persistence. "It seemed unbelievable, but I never found a clear spot," he wrote later in Natural History magazine. "In the week it took to cross the subtropical high, no matter what time of day I looked, plastic debris was floating everywhere: bottles, bottle caps, wrappers, fragments." In the years since the plastic buildup has only worsened. In a recent article in the New York Times, Moore reported that the Patch, through a process of accretion, now contains "solid areas you could walk on."

It's, therefore, good news that a massive cleansing project is proceeding ahead of schedule. Boyan Slat, who first set out a vision of his Ocean Cleanup machine in a TED talk six years ago when he was just 17, today announced that he'll begin hauling trash from the Patch in 2018. The news is vindication for the project, which has received plenty of TED-sized hype and millions of dollars in philanthropy, but which has also been criticized by some campaigners who say it's sucked up resources and raised expectations to impossible-to-achieve levels.

Due to what he calls a "technological breakthrough," Slat hopes the project will be cheaper and more effective than previously anticipated. Instead of removing 42% of the trash in the garbage patch over 10 years at a cost of $320 million, he now expects to collect 50% of total trash in just five years, and at a cost "significantly less" than $320 million.

Slat's design involves massive booms that collect trash using the Pacific's own currents. The booms act as an "artificial coastline" passively catching and then concentrating debris into the center, from where it's offloaded to a boat that sweeps by periodically (probably once a month). The "breakthrough" is that Slat no longer thinks that the booms need to be grounded to the ocean floor. Rather, he plans to suspend the booms with large anchors that float in deeper water, so the booms shift around the ocean, though still more slowly than the trash at the surface. Research showed that tidal speeds are more than four times slower at depths a few hundred feet below and that the difference is sufficient to still get the accumulating effects that Slat envisaged with a fixed boom.

The anchors will be suspended on lines in four segments, each 40 feet tall and 13 feet wide. They have a total surface area of 328 feet square, enough to provide plenty of drag to slow down the booms as plastic trash circulates around the "gyre"-a swirling trash vortex within the Garbage Patch.

Using a floating system has advantages in both cost and time, Slat says. The team no longer has to dig foundations at up to 2.8 miles deep and it can skip a prototyping stage. "We thought 'wait a minute, instead of fixing it to the seabed, we can fix it in that deep-water layer," Slat says in an interview from his Delft base, in the Netherlands. "The massive sea anchor slows down the system so it travels slower than at the surface, and the plastic still accumulates along the barrier and toward the center the system."

The Ocean Cleanup Foundation, now numbering 65 people, will begin testing a 0.6-mile prototype later this year, before full deployment in 2018. It recently announced it has raised more than $30 million for the effort, including $21.7 million since last November. Most of that has come from Silicon Valley apparently, including from Marc and Lynne Benioff, of Salesforce fame, and PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel (who is famous and infamous for many reasons). Other donations have come from the Julius Baer Foundation, Dutch multinational Royal DSM, and an anonymous benefactor.

As he was developing designs for the devices (our previous stories here, hereand here), Slat had imagined one massive device, perhaps extending as much as 60 miles. He now envisages up to 50 devices of 0.6 miles each. That constellation is more scalable and less risky, he says; if one device breaks down, there will still be 49 others operating at any time. Plus, they can be funded as cash flow allows, rather than all at once. A previous prototype deployed in the North Sea, off the rough Dutch coast, showed how a fixed boom could be beaten up quickly (eventually the prototype, joyfully known as "Boomy McBoomface." had to be taken out of the water). The new boom rides the waves rather than attempt to withstand them, and it's stiff and solid, not hollow and pumped with air.

Slat's calculation for the cleanup rate is a very big estimate. But his foundation, through several expeditions by boat and by plane, has mapped the Patch's trash extensively. And he claims to have done a lot of mathematic modeling to understand how the marine devices and the trash will interact in the wild. Slat, who's still only 22, expects to collect tens of thousands of tons of debris a year, and for each device to need emptying (by a "garbage truck of the oceans") every month or so. It's not known how much trash is in the Patch, though it's probably of the order of hundreds of thousands of tons. Scientists have estimated there are five trillion pieces of plastic in the world's oceans, weighing more than 250,000 tons in total.

Slat and I spoke over Skype, and toward the end of our chat he holds up some sunglasses made from ocean plastic. The long-term plan is to recycle all the plastic collected into items like car bumpers, chairs, and eyewear, and for companies to sponsor each boom with prominent logos. That will help defray the cost, he says. It's a fail-proof, wonderfully imaginative, scheme. We'll just have to hope it's as seaworthy as Slat imagines.

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Boy Genius Boyan Slat's Giant Ocean Cleanup Machine Is Real

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A system of trash-collecting booms will launch in 2018, and--the 22-year-old inventor claims--will collect half the plastic trash in the Pacific Garbage Patch in five years.

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How the oceans can clean themselves: Boyan Slat at TEDxDelft

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A small island smack in the middle of the South Pacific has never been inhabited by people - and yet, its white sand beaches are home to more than 37 million pieces of junk.

Every day on Henderson Island - one of the most remote places on Earth - trash from every continent except Antarctica washes up its shores. Fishing nets and floats, water bottles, and plastics break into small particles against the rocks and sand.

In 2015, Jennifer Lavers, a researcher at the University of Tasmania, traveled to Henderson in an effort to document the extent of plastics pollution. Her research paper has since gone viral.

Lavers shared images from her trip with us.

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Alarming photos of the uninhabited island that's home to 37 million pieces of trash

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A small island smack in the middle of the South Pacific has never been inhabited by people - and yet, its white sand beaches are home to more than 37 million pieces of junk. Every day on Henderson Island - one of the most remote places on Earth - trash from every continent except Antarctica washes up its shores.

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Researchers say they have discovered the highest density of trash in the world on a tiny, remote island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. According to a report this month in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, an estimated 38 million pieces of trash have washed up on Henderson Island.

How could this happen? Here & Now's Robin Young speaks with Enric Sala (@Enric_Sala), National Geographic explorer-in-residence and marine ecologist. Sala was not involved in this particular study, but has visited the island through his work with the Pristine Seas project.
On whether he knew how much trash was on the island prior to a 2012 visit
"Yes, it's difficult not to notice. The whole beach was covered in fishing lines and buoys, flip-flops, plastic bottles. It was atrocious. But, there are other places that have not been reported in the scientific literature that are as bad. There are beaches in Mumbai in India, a beach in Singapore. And all this plastic in the ocean kills hundreds of thousands of sea birds, sea turtles and marine mammals every year."
On the importance of being able to trace trash back to its country of origin
"In this particular study in Henderson, most of the identifiable trash came from China, Japan and Chile, and this clearly shows that trash from all over the world is transported all over the ocean. And we have to think that 80 percent of the trash in the ocean comes from the land."
On how trash winds up in the ocean
"It could be the plastic bag from the supermarket that the wind takes away, or the microfibers that come out when I wash my polar fleece, in my washing machine at home. The ocean is downstream of everything, so all this plastic that doesn't end up on a landfill ends up in the ocean."

"The ocean, actually, instead of thinking of garbage patches or islands, we should think of the ocean as a giant plastic soup."
Enric Sala

On what it's like to walk down the beach
"We were diving around Henderson Island, beautiful place, near pristine. And then you get on your small boat, and you go across the reef, and land on the beach. And you see this vertical wall, 30 meters of limestone with this tropical forest on top, and it's beautiful. But as soon as you look down, you see orange, green, white plastic of all sizes and of all types.

"But the worst part is not what you see, but what you cannot see. Because people have heard about these great garbage patches in the middle of the ocean, and there are areas with a great accumulation of large debris. But most of the plastic in the ocean is microscopic. So the ocean, actually, instead of thinking of garbage patches or islands, we should think of the ocean as a giant plastic soup."
On whether the island acts similar to a bathtub drain
"Yes, so imagine that you had these counterclockwise currents that go all across the Pacific. And think of Henderson as a wall that these currents hit. So all the trash that is transported by the currents ends up washed on those beaches."
On whether he has confidence that the trend can be reversed
"It is going to be very, very difficult to clean up the plastic in the ocean. But we can prevent plastic from getting into the ocean. Businesses have to shift to a circular economy, where there is no waste, where every material is going to be reused into something else. And then the consumer also has a responsibility. For example, I don't use single-use plastic bags, I have my strong canvas bags that I have been using for years. I don't use plastic straws. So if the consumers don't use single-use plastics, we're going to have a big impact in the way things are right now."

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How This Remote Island Became Home To Millions Of Pieces Of Trash

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Researchers say they have discovered the highest density of trash in the world on a tiny, remote island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. According to a report this month in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, an estimated 38 million pieces of trash have washed up on Henderson Island.

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This tiny island with no humans is getting buried in plastic trash

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Henderson Island, a remote locale in the South Pacific, is covered with 37.7 million pieces of plastic debris -- the highest density ever recorded in the world for a beach.

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For Animals, Plastic Is Turning the Ocean Into a Minefield

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For Animals, Plastic Is Turning the Ocean Into a Minefield

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https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/06/plastic-planet-animals-wildlife-impact-waste-pollution/

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This story is part of Planet or Plastic?-our multiyear effort to raise awareness about the global plastic waste crisis. Learn what you can do to reduce your own single-use plastics, and take your pledge.

Read this story and more in the June 2018 issue of National Geographic magazine.

On a boat off Costa Rica, a biologist uses pliers from a Swiss army knife to try to extract a plastic straw from a sea turtle's nostril. The turtle writhes in agony, bleeding profusely. For eight painful minutes the YouTube video ticks on; it has logged more than 20 million views, even though it's so hard to watch. At the end the increasingly desperate biologists finally manage to dislodge a four-inch-long straw from the creature's nose.

Raw scenes like this, which lay bare the toll of plastic on wildlife, have become familiar: The dead albatross, its stomach bursting with refuse. The turtle stuck in a six-pack ring, its shell warped from years of straining against the tough plastic. The seal snared in a discarded fishing net.

But most of the time, the harm is stealthier. Flesh-footed shearwaters, large, sooty brown seabirds that nest on islands off the coasts of Australia and New Zealand, eat more plastic as a proportion of their body mass than any other marine animal, researchers say: In one large population, 90 percent of the fledglings had already ingested some. A plastic shard piercing an intestine can kill a bird quickly. But typically the consumption of plastic just leads to chronic, unrelenting hunger.

"The really sad thing about this is that they're eating plastic thinking it's food," says Matthew Savoca, a marine biologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. "Imagine you ate lunch and then just felt weak and lethargic and hungry all day. That would be very confusing." Fish such as anchovies, Savoca has found, eat plastic because it smells like food once it's covered with algae. Seabirds, expending energy their malnourished bodies don't have, roam farther in search of real food, only to drag back plastic waste to feed their young.

What makes plastic useful for people-its durability and light weight-increases the threat to animals. Plastic hangs around a long time, and a lot of it floats. "Single-use plastics are the worst. Period. Bar none," Savoca says, referring to straws, water bottles, and plastic bags. Some 700 species of marine animals have been reported-so far-to have eaten or become entangled in plastic.

We don't fully understand plastic's long-term impact on wildlife (nor its impact on us). We haven't been using the stuff for very long. The first documented cases of seabirds ingesting plastic were 74 Laysan albatross chicks found on a Pacific atoll in 1966, when plastic production was roughly a twentieth of what it is today. In hindsight, those birds seem like the proverbial canaries in a coal mine.

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For Animals, Plastic Is Turning the Ocean Into a Minefield

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This story is part of Planet or Plastic?-our multiyear effort to raise awareness about the global plastic waste crisis. Learn what you can do to reduce your own single-use plastics, and take your pledge. Read this story and more in the June 2018 issue of National Geographic magazine.

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‘Plastic is literally everywhere’: the epidemic attacking Australia’s oceans

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‘It never breaks down and goes away,’ say scientists struggling to understand the impact of widespread pollution

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Explore National Geographic. A world leader in geography, cartography and exploration.

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Kids Take Action Against Ocean Plastic | Short Film Showcase

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PBS Video on plastic

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Be Smart | How Much Plastic is in the Ocean? | Season 5 | Episode 10 | PBS

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Ocean plastic pollution is a massive environmental problem.