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In the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, in the North Pacific, there’s an estimated
72,000 metric tons of macroplastics; pieces of plastic larger than half a millimeter.
That’s about the weight of one and a half Titanics.
And it’s actually not alone.
There are other such garbage patches, defined as having
over a million pieces of floating plastic in a square kilometer of ocean.
So… we should clean that up, probably.
But that is, unfortunately, easier said than done, because any human action
can have consequences for the environment,
even if we’re trying to fix a problem that we created in the first place.
There’s a whole set of creatures that live right at the surface of the ocean,
including blue button jellies, sea skaters, sea snails, crustaceans, and crabs.
Collectively, these are referred to as neuston.
They’re transported by the same ocean currents that cause plastic to
accumulate in patches; so these garbage patches are full of life.
In some ways, floating plastic can actually help the critters
because it gives them a surface to grab on to and attach their eggs to.
So if you clean up that plastic, you might also catch
some of those creatures living on and amongst it.
And neuston have an important place in the ecosystem
as a food source for sea turtles, and birds, and fish like tuna.
So a 2023 study set out to calculate what impact
a plastic cleanup operation might have on these organisms.
And they chose one in particular: The Ocean Cleanup,
which uses two ships that drag a net between them to collect plastic.
The researchers built a mathematical model to describe the change in
the number of plastics, as well as neuston, throughout a cleanup operation.
And they concluded that we still don’t know enough about the neuston ecosystem,
meaning the range of possible impacts
plastic cleanup could have on it is pretty wide.
It’s possible everything would be fine, in which case,
full steam ahead, go get that plastic.
But if you move a few sliders in their model,
the impact suddenly becomes substantial.
Two of the unknown variables are questions that
scientists need to work on researching.
How fast do the creatures that make up
the neuston ecosystem replenish themselves?
And how quickly does plastic break down naturally without being cleaned up?
The third variable is how good the cleanup is at catching plastic, but not critters.
So that’s up to The Ocean Cleanup, and other similar efforts.
To their credit, The Ocean Cleanup themselves say they carefully monitor
all marine life and will use the information they gather
to improve the next iteration of their cleaning net system.
Now, of course none of this means that we should not
clean up our plastic waste from the ocean.
Plastic also negatively affects marine life when
it releases toxic chemicals or gets eaten.
And we haven’t even talked about the impacts of microplastics,
since those slip through cleanup nets anyway.
The best thing we can do is prevent plastic pollution in the first place.
But cleanup efforts are likely an important part of the solution.
So it’s studies like these that help us see the full impact of our actions,
even those that feel like obviously good ideas.
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