Sunday Essay: The Great Cleanup

Sunday Essay Cartoon by John Gilbert Manantan
Sunday Essay Cartoon by John Gilbert Manantan

LAST Sunday, public workers and volunteers gathered heaps of trash during an activity that launched a government-led effort to clean up and restore Manila Bay. The haul, GMA News Online reported, amounted to nearly 41,000 kilos. That’s a huge pile of snack wrappers, sachets, bottles and other discards.

Meanwhile, half an ocean away, another cleanup effort awaited a fresh start.

In Hawaii’s Hilo Bay, a team from The Ocean Cleanup was at work trying to repair Wilson, a huge boom that a Maersk ship had towed less than four months ago to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Wilson is a 609-meter contraption—long enough to stretch from the Cebu Capitol flagpole to just a few meters shy of Fuente Osmeña—that was designed to collect debris from “the largest accumulation of ocean plastic in the world.” Participants named it after the volleyball that Tom Hanks’ character in “Cast Away” keeps for company, otherwise loneliness would drive him insane.

The Ocean Cleanup, founded in 2013 by Dutch entrepreneur Boyan Slat, estimates that some 100,000 metric tons of plastic trash float in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. “Patch” is an inadequate word that brings to mind a collection of adorable soft dolls. This patch, the stretch of ocean where Wilson was put to work, is about five times the size of the Philippine archipelago. Four other patches (or ocean gyres) like it exist, where the winds and currents spin crates, old fishing nets and other disused plastic things.

Slat has raised some US$40 million to deploy systems like Wilson, and his project’s goal is to remove ocean plastics before these break down into microplastics and are ingested by birds and marine animals. The plan is for ships to collect the debris and bring it back to land for recycling. This week’s issue of The New Yorker features the work being done by Slat and The Ocean Cleanup, in a terrific article by Carolyn Kormann.

Not everyone is enthusiastic about Slat’s efforts. Some have argued that it would be more productive to focus on prevention, such as by setting up zero-waste systems in local governments. Other campaigns emphasize “extended producer responsibility,” a policy approach that requires companies to adopt environmentally sustainable product design and to bear part of the costs of treating and disposing of post-consumer items, such as plastic containers that many communities lack the facilities to recycle. Or plastic bags that, whatever the labels may say, don’t really biodegrade.

The gathering of more than 40 tons of trash from part of Manila’s shores is a good effort, but we all need to do more to help. An Ocean Conservancy report in 2015 identified the Philippines as one of the top three sources of plastic waste in oceans, along with China and Indonesia. Consider this, for scale: all the trash collected last Sunday in Manila represent less than a thousandth of a percent of the estimated 1.15 to 2.41 million tons of plastic wastes that enter the ocean each year. So instead of arguing about who deserves credit for the cleanup, why don’t we focus on finding more ways to discard less plastic?

Think about it in personal terms. Think of how much plastic, particularly single-use plastic, your household generates; how many coffee or milk tea cups, shampoo sachets, straws, grocery bags, polystyrene containers, detergent bags, and junk food snack packets you toss out each day or week. We may not come up with an idea that attracts $40 million in funding and stirs up international coverage, and we might not have done more than join the occasional cleanup so far, but this is a challenge we all have a stake in. What will you give up? What habits will you change?

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