> distract from real unsexy solutions like grab the plastic in rivers BEFORE they make it to the ocean.

They pivoted to mostly river cleanup (interceptors) many years ago. And they clearly show that it is just one step back, not a full time solution. Ocean cleanup is last step, river grab is the step before that and having proper garbage collection would be best.

Which is literally written in TFA:

> Now they mostly intercept plastic when it first leaves rivers and enters the ocean instead of trying to scoop it out of the middle of the ocean, though the open ocean work is still mentioned on their website

My read of the article is that they’ve also pivoted to the methods experts suggest as well. The article actually phrases that in a negative way weirdly. I agree with the original comment, at least they’re trying and iterating. You get conflicting feedback from experts in all cases. At some point you have to commit and try.

Alternatively, creating incentives for plastics to never be deposited in rivers to begin with...

"The results, published last November in Environmental Science & Technology, show that rivers collectively dump anywhere from 0.47 million to 2.75 million metric tons of plastic into the seas every year, depending on the data used in the models. The 10 rivers that carry 93 percent of that trash are the Yangtze, Yellow, Hai, Pearl, Amur, Mekong, Indus and Ganges Delta in Asia, and the Niger and Nile in Africa. The Yangtze alone dumps up to an estimated 1.5 million metric tons of plastic waste into the Yellow Sea."

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/stemming-the-plas...

How about regulate plastic so it doesn't end up in the river in the first place?

Worrying about cleanup without worrying about why we have to clean it up in the first place is a losing approach. It reads as just 'recycle better' without wondering why consumers have that burden in the first place.

> The issue with high-profile half-baked interventions is that they distract from real unsexy solutions like grab the plastic in rivers BEFORE they make it to the ocean.

You mean they distract from doing… exactly what they are doing?

Maybe give a team that has been working on this problem for 10+ years enough credit to check what they are doing before dismissing them.

Yes they might catch a lot of animals, but I didn't read how harmfull this really is.

When you drive at night you kill a huge amount of insects. But we don't consider this harmful.

So the real question is: do they save more animals by removing the plastic.

By the way: there are a lot of scientists involved in the Ocean Cleanup team. So I don't think they overlook the fact that they catch animals.

What evidence is there that people would start funding river clean up if they stopped funding in-ocean initiatives?

Why take the article at face value on this? "Experts" (academics) don't have a good reputation when it comes to practical stuff like this. They rewrite history all the time, so it's always worth double checking what they really said.

I read the first linked article where these experts in ocean plastic and ocean engineering supposedly give their great insights, back in 2015. It lists "6 Reasons That Floating Ocean Plastic Cleanup Gizmo is a Horrible Idea" (what a headline!). But the six reasons are either unhelpful, unconstructive, arguments in bad faith, silly, or exactly the sort of stop energy that activists specialize in. They were:

1. Ocean plastic doesn't behave the way the project's backers say it does.

Ocean Cleanup said the amount of plastic drops off exponentially fast after three meters of depth. The rebuttal of the expert oceanographers is that they stopped looking after five meters (as you'd expect if it drops off sharply after three), and that plastic can also be found at 100m of depth. This is presented as mistake by Ocean Cleanup but obviously isn't. Neither fact is incompatible with nearly all the plastic being in shallow depths.

Then they ding it because the machine as designed can't capture pieces of plastic smaller than 2cm, although lots of plastic has degraded to tiny particles. This is the nirvana fallacy in action: you aren't planning a perfect solution to the problem, therefore you're misleading people when you say you're going to tackle it. Only childish people think like this. Engineers know no solution is ever perfect.

2. The collectors will break really quickly

In 2004 the booms in the feasibility study weren't specced to a level that could survive large storms. It was designed to raise money and see if any plastic could be collected at all, so this is expected. Then it says Boyan Slat planned to do the 2015 test in the "relatively protected waters of the Korean Strait" i.e. somewhere large storms wouldn't necessarily be a problem. This isn't a critique.

3. The project will harm wildlife

By wildlife they mean plankton. This is a ridiculous and bad faith argument, the sort of critique that could apply to literally any object in the ocean including sperm whales.

4. Recyclers don't want the plastic

So? It can be landfilled. The goal is to get it out of the ocean, not create new Coke bottles. This critique makes no sense.

5. There's a far more effective way

They mean getting volunteers to pick trash off beaches. Very NGO mindset: why mechanize when you can hold a splashy single-day event and make everyone feel good about themselves. It was obvious why that doesn't work. The link they give to find the next event is a 404 and the NGO website containing it no longer mentions any beach cleanup events. Instead the "Take Action Against Plastics" section of their site now asks people to lobby Congress.

6. It's better to not put plastic in the ocean in the first place

Obviously. But people do, which is why the project exists. This is not a reason why trying to remove plastic from the ocean is a "horrible idea".

So: six arguments, of which the best is that the initial PoC wasn't built to production specifications - the sort of argument only people who have never built anything make. I don't see any reason to side against Slat here.

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> for every $2 invested Ocean Conservancy can remove a pound of trash from the environment and invest in scientific research and upstream policy solutions to prevent plastics from being produced and/or entering our ocean in the first place.” As of this writing, The Ocean Cleanup reports it has removed 117.3 million pounds of waste from the ocean and (mostly) rivers. The nonprofit spent more than $72 million across its 2022-2024 fiscal years, according to tax filings

That math doesn't show what the author might want it to - The Ocean Cleanup removed ~118Mlbs of waste for $72m, while it would take $246M to do the same with the "incredibly low cost" methods of the Ocean Conservancy?