The Importance Of Cleaning The Ocean Essay

People can be extremely creative when it comes to problems that affect our existence. On small scale cleanup, two Australian surfers have come up with a bucket that takes trash and oil off the top of the ocean. Already contributing, “SeaBins have been installed at marinas around the world” (Herreria), keeping local beaches and marinas cleaner and safer. On a much larger scale Boyan Slat, a 23 year old from the Netherlands, has come up with a way to clean up half of the trash floating in the North Pacific Gyre with a machine he invented at the age of 19. According to their research, “A full-scale deployment of our systems is estimated to clean up 50 % of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in 5 years”(TheOceanCleanup). This invention runs on solar power and the ocean current, making it the best possible solution we have to cleaning up the ocean. But in the meantime there’s still steps that can be done everyday to reduce plastic waste. Refusing single use

This affects the world on a larger scale. Asia is the leading producer of trash in the ocean. This is mostly in part to the lax laws for trash disposal, as well as garbage men cutting corners. In doing this, they hapasardiously dump trash on the side of the road or near river beds so that the water washes it away, it’s a highly illegal action that’s constant across Asia. According to PRI, “research suggests that up to 90 percent of the plastic dumped illegally ends up in the ocean… this practice adds nearly 1 million metric tons of plastic trash to the seas each year” (Winn). Countries within Asia look the other way at these statistics which prompts critics of ocean cleanup to say that it will never happen. They claim that we don’t “fully understand the precise impacts of ocean trash” (Rastogi). Countries need to unite in order to fix what is happening, which is something a lot of people won’t bargain