Cleanup Group Says It's on Track to Eliminate the Great Pacific Garbage Patch

It claims it can get rid of the patch within just five years.

Trash Hunters

Nonprofit environmental organization the Ocean Cleanup has announced that it's on track to eliminate the Great Pacific Garbage Patch by 2034.

If it can get the necessary funds, that is. In a press release, the organization claimed that eliminating the patch once and for all would cost a whopping $7.5 billion — the "first time both a cost and a timeline has been placed on ridding the Pacific Ocean of the environmental hazard."

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a name given to an estimated 79,000 metric tons of plastic waste floating in the ocean in an area roughly twice the size of Texas. The Ocean Cleanup has made it its mission to fish it out of the water piece by piece.

"Today’s announcement is clear: clean oceans can be achieved in a manageable time and for a clear cost," said founder and CEO Boyan Slat in a statement. "Through the hard work of the past ten years, humanity has the tools needed to clean up the ocean."

Plastic Beach

Researchers have found that the patch is growing rapidly, making it a massively difficult problem to deal with.

To make a dent, the Ocean Cleanup has been developing new technologies to fish this plastic out of the water. Its latest iteration, called System 03 consists of a floating barrier roughly 1.4 miles long, which is towed between two vessels.

So far, the nonprofit claims it has fished out a million pounds of trash from the patch, a mere 0.5 percent of its total. But within a decade, it says, it could ramp up its operations to get rid of it in its entirety.

Next year, the company will focus its efforts on establishing a "hotspot" map of areas in the ocean with "intense plastic accumulation."

While $7.5 billion may sound like a lot, it's less than one month's worth of Apple's profits last year, or a sixth of the bonus Tesla shareholders awarded to CEO Elon Musk.

The Ocean Cleanup also put that price tag into perspective, pointing out that the annual spend on Halloween decorations in the US alone was $10.6 billion. A mere one percent of the "annual net profits of the world's plastic producers" is also just $7.2 billion.

Better yet, if the nonprofit's latest technological ideas come to fruition, Slat suggests we could even clear the patch in just five years at a cost of just $4 billion.

"We call upon the world to relegate the Great Pacific Garbage Patch to the history books," said Slat in the press release. "This environmental catastrophe has been allowed to exist, unresolved, for too long, and for the first time, we can tell the world what it costs, what is needed and how long it could take."

"The only thing standing between us and clean oceans is money," he added.

More on the Ocean Cleanup: This Nonprofit Is Making Sunglasses Out of Recovered Ocean Waste