Student Congresslegislation Evidence

Student CongressLegislation Evidence

Student Congress Legislation & Evidence

A Resolution to Clean Ocean Plastic Pollution

Pro: Ocean Plastic Clean Up Good

Con: Ocean Plastic Clean Up Bad

A Resolution to Stop Overfishing

Pro: Individual Fishing Quotas

Con: Individual Fishing Quotas

A Bill to Incentivize Off Shore Wind Energy

Pro: Off Shore Wind

Con: Off Shore Wind

A Resolution to Clean Ocean Plastic Pollution

Whereas, the United States and many other nations have been consuming vast amounts of plastic; and

Whereas, unbeknownst to most people huge amounts of plastic finds its way to the oceans; and

Whereas, there are more than seven million tons of plastic floating around the ocean’s surface;and

Whereas, plastic ocean pollution is causinggreat damage to ocean life of all shapes and sizes with many

creatures dying; and

Whereas, ocean animals, including birds that frequent the ocean surface and tiny plankton that are eaten

by larger fish are starting to eat plastic; and

Whereas, if fish are consuming plastic and people are eating those fish, people are starting to eat plastic

and therefore face health risks including cancer; and

Whereas, Robert Slat, a young engineering student has developed a test-proven device with the Ocean

Clean Up Project that can clean the plastic out of the ocean for just afew million dollars.

THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED by the Student Congress Assembled that:the United States federal

government should develop a system of passive ocean plastic clean up arrays as proposed by the

Ocean Clean Up Project.

Pro: Ocean Plastic Clean Up Good

Our obsession with plastic produces millions of tons of trash to dump into the oceans. These plastics break down but do not biodegrade. We are poisoning our oceans with a galaxy of trash islands that kill fish, coral and threaten the health of the oceans themselves.

Weishar, news and political reporter and founder of Quiet Mike, 2014“The Ocean Size Problem of Ocean Pollution”, Quiet Mike,

Our oceans cover approximately 71% of the Earth’s surface and contains 97% of the Earth’s water. With those kind of numbers, you’d think it would be hard for us humans to pose a threat to it. Well, humans are capable of anything when we put our destructive minds to it. While the media has under reported the threat of climate change, it has completely ignored the state of our oceans. From oil spills to plastic bags to random sea junk, our oceans may soon resemble some of our dead lakes. The situation is more desperate than you think.Most people think oil spills do the most harm to our waters. It certainly does damage to be sure, however plastic is far worse than oil. There is currently seven million tonnes of plastic floating around in our oceans. Your may have heard of the Pacific and Atlantic garbage patches. They are not large trash islands in the middle of the ocean as some believe. They are more like galaxies of garbage, populated by millions of smaller trash islands that may be hidden underwater or spread out over many miles. These garbage patches are made up of mostly plastic. Unfortunately, plastic breaks down into smaller particles (or micro-plastics) and is then consumed by marine life. This is what makes plastic so bad and difficult to clean up.A lot of it can’t be seen, and therefore the size of these patches are almost impossible to estimate. I’ve heard they are as little as the size of Texas (if you can call that small) or as big as the continental United States. I imagine the truth lies somewhere in between.Plastic uses up only 8% of the world’s oil supply, but we use it now more than ever. In fact, we’ve produced more plastic in the last ten years than the previous hundred years combined. Our addiction to plastic isn’t going away anytime soon and because plastic is not biodegradable, it is not going away either.According to Captain Paul Watson, the founder of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, if we don’t change our ways, all the world’s fisheries will collapse by 2048. He also believes that all our coral reefs may be gone by as early as 2025. Pretty scary.

Plastics floating in the oceans provide a unique problem since they break down into tiny pieces but take hundreds of years to disappear.

Cho, staff blogger for the Earth Institute, 2011(Renee, “Our Oceans: A Plastic Soup”, Earth Institute, 1-26,

The lightness and durability that make plastic such a useful and versatile material for manufacturers also make it a long-term problem for the environment. Trash Travels estimates that plastic bags can take 20 years to decompose, plastic bottles up to 450 years, and fishing line, 600 years; but in fact, no one really knows how long plastics will remain in the ocean. With exposure to UV rays and the ocean environment, plastic breaks down into smaller and smaller fragments. The majority of the plastic found in the ocean are tiny pieces less than 1 cm. in size, with the mass of 1/10 of a paper clip.

Pro: Ocean Plastic Clean Up Good

Despite the huge amount of trash involved, most pieces of plastic concentrate in gyres or giant circuits located in each of the earth’s oceans.

Surfrider Foundation & UCLA School of Law’s Environmental Law Clinic, 2013 (“Federal Actions to Address Plastic Marine Pollution,

Marine litter tends to accumulate in a limited number of sub-tropical convergence zones known as gyres or garbage patches. Currently, there are five gyres: North Pacific, South Pacific, North Atlantic, South Atlantic, and Indian Ocean. Studies have shown that marine litter deposited in coastal areas tends to accumulate in the gyres within two years of entering the ocean. The litter remains cycling within these gyres for many years, with more than 200,000 pieces of plastic per square kilometer in some areas. The sizes of the gyres are difficult to determine because they are constantly expanding and moving, but the gyres are estimated to contain 100 million tons of marine litter.

Ocean debris effects marine life by trapping, choking or poisoning animals that it comes in contact with. Plastics kill millions of animals each year and could destroy entire species.

Slat et al, founder and lead designer The Ocean Cleanup Project, 2014

(Boyan, “A Feasibility Study”,

Every year we produce about 300 million tons of plastic, a portion of which enters and accumulates in the oceans. Due to large offshore currents, plastic concentrates in vast areas called gyres, of which the Great Pacific Garbage Patch between Hawaii and California is the best known example.The damage to sea life is staggering: at least one million seabirds, and hundreds of thousands of marine mammals die each year due to the pollution. Even worse, the survival of many species, like the Hawaiian Monk Seal and Loggerhead Turtle, is directly jeopardized by plastic debris.

Marine species often become entangled in larger debris, leading to “injury, illness, suffocation, starvation, and even death” (NOAA, 2014). Smaller fragments can be mistaken for food and eaten, causing malnutrition, intestinal blockage and death. When marine animals eat plastic, harmful chemicals move up the food chain. Ingestion of and entanglement in marine debris by marine animals has increased by 40 percent in the last decade. Furthermore, plastics can transport invasive species and toxic substances over great distances.

Pro: Ocean Plastic Clean Up Good

This is not just a problem for species living in the deep ocean. Plastic debris introduces cancerous chemicals into the food chain which affect every species including humans.

Cho, staff blogger for the Earth Institute, 2011(Renee, “Our Oceans: A Plastic Soup”, Earth Institute, 1-26,

A recent study found that plastics take up and accumulate persistent organic pollutants (POPs) such as carcinogenic and endocrine-disrupting polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), and organochlorine pesticides such as DDD, a derivative of DDT. Over 50 percent of the plastic samples studied contained PCBs, and over 75 percent contained PAHs. According to Moore, plastic debris can attract and concentrate POPs up to a million times their levels in the surrounding seawater, and when consumed by marine animals, the POPs endanger both the creatures that ingest them and humans higher up on the food chain, especially infants. Moore has said, “No fish monger on Earth can sell you a certified organic wild-caught fish.”

The Ocean Cleanup Array would cost only 2 million dollars and prevent the buildup of plastics in our oceans.

Business Week, 2014

(Caroline Winter, “This 19-Year-Old Is Ready to Build an Ocean Cleanup Machine”,

The world’s oceans contain millions of tons of trash, much of it collected into vast gyres of plastic and debris. Even if humanity stopped putting garbage in the water today, researchers project that these garbage patches would continue growing for hundreds of years. One such trash vortex, known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, already spans hundreds of miles.How do we get all that garbage out? Boyan Slat, a 19-year-old Dutch aeronautical engineering student,is raising $2 million to build an ocean cleanup contraption he designed to passively funnel garbage to specific collection points. Working with a team of over 100 people, he recently released a 528-page feasibility study (PDF) detailing how the complex technology works and grappling with questions of legality, costs, environmental impact, and potential pitfalls.Slat’s plan, expressed simply, is to deploy several V-shaped floating barriers that would be moored to the seabed and placed in the path of major ocean currents. The 30-mile-long arms of the V are designed to catch buoyant garbage and trash floating three meters below the surface while allowing sea life to pass underneath. “Because no nets would be used, a passive cleanup may well be harmless to the marine ecosystem,” he writes in the feasibly study.Over time, the trash would flow deeper into the V , from which it would then be extracted. The report estimates that the plastic collection rate would total 65 cubic meters per day and that the trash would have to be picked up by ship every 45 days. Slat hopes to offset costs by recycling the collected plastic for other uses.

Pro: Ocean Plastic Clean Up Good

A passive collection system design would work, it just needs to be implemented on a broader scale.

Slat et al, founder and lead designer The Ocean Cleanup Project, 2014(Boyan, “A Feasibility Study”, p. 29)

Proof of conceptA first proof-of-concept test performed at the Azores Islands validated the capture and concentration potential of a floating barrier with a skirt depth of 3 m, in moderate environmental conditions. In addition, qualitative data suggested that the barrier does not catch zooplankton as the net behind the boom appeared to have caught an equal amount of zooplankton as the net next to the boom

Passive technology is scalable and will allow for ocean clean up in all 5 oceans for a limited cost.

Slat et al, founder and lead designer The Ocean Cleanup Project, 2014

The main advantage of passive cleanup is that it is scalable. Using conventional ship-and-net methods, it has been estimated that it would take about 79,000 years to remediate the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (Moore and Philips 2011). And that estimate assumes that vessels cover the entire oceanic area, and that the plastic pollution is spatially static. While the former assumption isperhaps naive or unrealistic, the latter is false. Ship-and net methods are less efficient as the high variability in current directions caused by eddies makes them either repeat their run on the same patch of the sea or to miss some of the plastics.In contrast, our concept uses the natural movement of the water to its advantage. In combination with the circulation period of the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, the cleanup duration could be drastically reduced (a minimum of 5 years).Due to the passive collection approach, operational expenses can potentially be very low, making the cleanup more cost-effective. Furthermore, converting the extracted plastic into energy, oil or new materials could cover (a large part of) the costs of the execution.

Passive collections is the only cost effective option and annual operating costs can be covered by selling plastic recycled from the project.

Slat et al, founder and lead designer The Ocean Cleanup Project, 2014

The Ocean Cleanup Array is estimated to be 33 times cheaper than conventional cleanup proposals per extracted mass of plastics. In order to extract 70 million kg (or 42 percent) of garbage from the North Pacific Gyre over 10 years, we calculated a total cost of 317 million euro. In the calculations, a limited lifetime of 10 years is applied instead of a general economic lifetime (for most equipment 20 years). This is because projections indicate the mean amount of plastic mass will decrease with time. Thus, the average mass of plastic that will be collected per year will likely be lower than what has been calculated using the 10-year deployment time. As expected with the passive cleanup concept, capital expenditures outweigh the operating expenditures. The total annual estimated operating expenditures is estimated at five million euro. A break-even cost of €4.53 per kg of plastic collected must be realized in order for The Ocean Cleanup Array to be profitable. This amount falls in the range of beach cleanup costs, estimated to be €0.07 – €18.0 per kg. This is also less expensive than the plastic-caused damage to the maritime industry in the APEC region.

Con: Ocean Plastic Clean Up Bad

Nonprofit organizations are being set up in the status quo to create sustainable solutions to ocean clean up using gathered plastic for fuel.

Sesini, Masters in Green Management, Energy, and Corporate Social Responsibility at Bocconi University, 2011

(Marzia, “THE GARBAGE PATCH IN THE OCEANS: THE PROBLEM AND POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS“ )

Moreover, in an effort to implement best practices collaborative private/nonprofit partnerships have been created to help reduce and prevent marine debris. Project Kaisei, a nonprofit organization that organizes plastic cleaning expedition in the Pacific Ocean, and Covanta Energy, a Fairfield-based company that owns waste-to-energy power generation plants, under the auspices of the Global Clinton Initiatives (GCI) partner up to clean up the ocean debris starting with the plastic in the North Pacific Gyre, with a yearly conversion target of 50 tons of marine debris into renewable energy.Covanta Energy uses the debris collected by Project Kaisei to “test its new waste-to- fuel technology to convert the plastic into a diesel substitute using a catalytic process for converting solid organic materials directly to mineral diesel fuel” (Covanta Energy), and to showcase how waste, and in particular plastic, can have added value if properly recycled. This in the hope that a larger scale cleanup effort will take place, helping protect the ocean and the marine wild life (Covanta Energy).¶ 16¶

Even passive clean up systems will kill plankton caught in the system.

Wilson, Associate Director at The 5 Gyres Institute, 2013(Stiv,”The Fallacy of Cleaning the Gyres of Plastic With a Floating "Ocean Cleanup Array", Inhabitat, July 17,

Another technicality is bycatch. Slat suggests that plankton wouldn’t be collected along with the plastic, though he admits more research is needed on this. The definition of plankton is an organism that can’t swim against a current; plankton have no control where they go and the assumption that they’ll somehow avoid the current that is taking the plastic into the processing thinga-ma-jiggy is a bad one. After conducting 50+ surface samples myself, at least half of the material we get from the surface is biomass. Zooplankton is really fragile, and trying to separate it from plastic in most cases is going to damage these critters beyond survivability, especially on an industrial scale. Plan B in Slat’s concept is to centrifuge the critters out—that would rip off their antennae and feeding apparatus. Scientists, when collecting zooplankton, use live catch nets and are very, very careful so as not to damage them. Plankton biologists, needless to say, are skeptical. Though zooplankton certainly isn’t the most charismatic fauna out there (and probably wouldn’t draw the ire of PETA if Slat’s device killed them), let’s remember that all life in the ocean depends on plankton at the base of the food chain. And if one endangered sea turtle was caught up? The fines that Slat would face would bankrupt his project in a second.