The Ocean Cleanup is a highly touted nonprofit with the ambitious goal of cleaning up 90 percent of the ocean’s plastic. In reality, the initiative’s impact on the world’s floating debris would be minimal, researchers reported recently in Science of the Total Environment.

“I think the general public was believing that we had a solution to the plastic problem,” said Sönke Hohn, a marine biologist at the Leibniz Centre for Tropical Marine Research in Bremen, Germany, at the time of the study and lead author. “Our research showed that we are far away from having solved this problem if we don’t keep changing our behaviour.”

Each year, 5 million to 13 million metric tonnes (11 billion to 28 billion pounds) of plastic wash into the ocean. The amount is expected to triple over the next century. Not only does this pose a danger to marine life, which can get entangled in plastic or ingest it, but it’s also a risk to human health through eating contaminated seafood.

The Ocean Cleanup is one of the most prominent initiatives for confronting this rapidly growing ocean waste. Its cleanup device, according to marine biogeochemist Matthias Egger from the nonprofit, works like a “giant Pac-Man,” sweeping up the debris using a screen attached to a floating barrier. The organisation claims that it can use this device to clear the Great Pacific garbage patch—a vast gyre of plastic litter—of half its trash in five years.

To understand if the device could meet this goal, Hohn and his colleagues developed a mathematical model to simulate scooping plastic from the ocean. The team studied several scenarios: business as usual with no manual removal; one cleanup device; and a flotilla of 200 cleanup devices.

Results showed that one device would only remove a small fraction of 1 per cent of the plastic by 2150. Even with 200 cleanup devices spread around the ocean working continuously for 120 years, the impact was still extremely modest. The model was the first to quantify the device’s ability to remove accumulated plastic from the ocean.

Read the full article about ocean cleanup by Isabella Backman at Eco-Business.