Report: Great Pacific Garbage Patch Can Be Cleaned Up Within 5 Years

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a large floating accumulation of debris in the Pacific Ocean, can be cleaned up within 10 years at a cost of $7.5 billion — or within five years with a more aggressive strategy costing $4 billion.

That’s according to the Ocean Cleanup, a non-profit organization that has led the fight to remove the dangerous plastic from the Pacific — most of which, it says, consists of discarded fishing equipment from Japan and China.

The patch is one of the world’s most pressing environmental problems — one that Vice President Kamala Harris said, incorrectly, can be addressed by banning plastic straws (a policy, like many, that she since claims to have reversed).

In a press release Friday, the Ocean Cleanup said:

• After six years of development and three years of extraction operations, The Ocean Cleanup declares the Great Pacific Garbage Patch can be eliminated
• Ocean plastic pollution is one of the most urgent problems our oceans face today, costing the world up to $2.5 trillion per year in damage to economies, industries, and the environment
• The Ocean Cleanup’s operations demonstrate that the elimination of the GPGP can be done at today’s level of performance in 10 years at a cost of $7.5bn
• Data and modelling indicate that the removal of the GPGP could be achieved in 5 years at a cost of $4bn

The organization uses technology that it calls “System 03” to extract plastic from the ocean.

This author suggests in The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days that President Donald Trump could, upon taking office, order federal agencies to invest in technologies that can clean up the garbage patch — and to recoup the cost from the nations that are the origins of the trash, through U.S. courts and international tribunals if necessary.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days, available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.