Imagine walking to your favourite beach once a year and dumping 50kg of plastic on it. This is the thought experiment Gwenaële Coat, scientific director of the SeaCleaners, asked us to take part in at the Climate Action Hub at COP26. It is sobering that that is in effect what we are doing each year, albeit unintentionally. “When we talk about climate change, often we don’t think about plastic but the recent UNEP report showed that the emissions as a result of plastic pollution is significant,” Coat says.
Indeed, the figures are staggering. “At the moment plastic pollution causes three per cent of emissions, but on the current trajectory, it will be responsible for 19 per cent by 2040,” Coat adds. Right now, Every year, between 9 and 12 million tonnes of plastic waste is tipped into the ocean – around 17 tonnes every minute. Shockingly, 80 per cent of this pollution comes from the land, almost entirely via rivers. In fact just ten rivers – in Asia, Africa and South America – transport 90 per cent of the total volume of plastic debris. We are producing more plastic now than ever: plastic production has tripled in the past 25 years and is 200 times greater than in 1950.
What damage does this do? Plastics take more than 450 years to decompose in the ocean, and even then they do not decompose fully, but decompose into tiny nano-waste which is absorbed by micro-organisms – the bottom of the food chain – which means the plastic waste continues to exist in nature for thousands of years.
The effect of this is devastating: more than 100,000 mammals and one million marine birds die every year as a result of ingesting micro particles of waste or choking on plastic objects. Plastic also destroys ecosystems, particularly mangroves, a vital carbon sink, as the plastic gets trapped. A study published earlier this year revealed that that river deltas – where mangroves are located – receive 52 percent of river-borne plastic pollution, though they make up less than 1 percent of global coastlines.
“We must turn to the oceans as one of our major sources to fight climate change, it’s the planet’s largest carbon sink: one third of the C02 generated since industrial revolution is stored in the ocean. But they are in trouble. Thanks to C02,acidification contributes to unbalanced as the water PH changes and the water warms. Microplastics also interact with plankton and that causes huge problems.
“Everything is interconnected and marine litter and plastic are threat multipliers,” Coat says. “Another threat is the release of chemicals once the polymers break down. While research is helping understand the effect on health and on the planet, the full economic cost is not known. The more plastic we make, the more fossil fuel is required and the more we intensify the climate crisis in a continual cycle.”
Of course, part of the problem is that plastic is very good at what it does: it is lightweight, durable and cheap to produce, and as of yet, no real viable replacement to plastic has been found, or at least not one that can be produced at scale.
SeaCleaners will soon launch its first boat, the Mobula 8, which will launch in Indonesia by the end of the year. It will be able collect floating debris and micro pollution and can work in lakes, mangroves, rivers, and up to 5km from shore, and clean 15,000 sqm of surface area per hour. SeaCleaners is also trying to complete funding for The Manta, a much larger boat, which can collect between 1 to 3 tonnes of waste per hour, with the aim of collecting up to 10,000 tonnes per year. Featuring a solar panel, windmill and hydro-generator, The Manta will also host other scientific missions on board, and when in port will hold educational and learning conferences for the general public. According to Coat, the boat will be a showcase for innovative technological solutions for waste management and repurposing, and for clean shipping technologies for ‘green ships’ and ‘smart ships’, it will serve as a lever to accelerate the deployment of the circular economy in its areas of operation.
It's an intuitive, bold solution to tackle the plastic pollution crisis, but as we have seen throughout COP26, bold solutions are the ones we need. “There is no one big solution we have,” Coat says. “There are lots of NGOs working in this area, and it needs to be a collective effort. We need to really understand the local needs and work with local people and they know where the plastic comes from and they know what they can do with it if we offer solutions to them.”
The battle against plastic pollution mirrors the battle against climate change: difficult but utterly necessary, and one that SeaCleaners aims to be at the forefront of.