Problem mitigation strategies

Researchers around the globe agree on that the pollution of the ocean with plastics is a big problem. Approaches how to handle this problem however vary from cleaning up the gyres, over simply picking up plastics at beaches, till for instance altering landfills to reduce new littering. From my point of view, certainly all of these mitigation actions are required to get the marine pollution under control. The approach mentioned to clean up the big garbage patches in the middle of the ocean is driven forward by Boyan Slat, a very young Dutch entrepreneur and inventor. He invented a stationary floating construction that concentrates the superficial litter into a zone where it can be collected by boat and shipped to land for recycling (see theoceancleanup.com).  

Source: theoceancleanup.com/problem
In case you cannot read the text properly on the pics here just visit the webpage!

Another clean up strategy is the cleaning of beaches from debris, which happens a lot especially in tourist regions. But due to the spread of floating plastics by ocean currents as explained, beaches in remote areas where normally no one cleans up are littered as well. There the debris affects the local wildlife species mainly by entanglement & ingestion (Gregory, 2009). A practical example of remote beach cleaning is the initiative “Clean Up Svalbard” by the Governor of Spitsbergen, Oceanwide Expeditions and the Association of Arctic Expedition Cruise Operators (AECO). They launched a one-week arctic boat expedition with about 120 participants in summer 2015 to collect beach trash at the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, far away from the mainland and long behind the Arctic Circle (AECO, 2014). 

A travel report by a participant of that trip can be found under the following link:

https://maptia.com/caroldevine/stories/discard-art-svalbard-floating-exhibition

Further, most plastic in the ocean is of very small size, which makes its removal very problematic (Jambeck et al., 2015). Therefore “the most effective mitigation strategies must reduce inputs” states Jambeck et al. (2015, p. 768), which also is a mitigation strategy. To reduce the amount of plastics that newly enters the ocean every year is of course absolutely necessary to diminish the problem substantially in the long term. This means that citizens, industries and municipalities worldwide have to change their behaviour and practices, which surely is no easy undertaking but one of the big global problems that humankind needs to tackle.