In the article, “Boy Genius Boyan Slat’s Giant Ocean Machine Is Real”, Schiller (2017) explores the potential of a huge ocean cleaning initiative envisioned by Slat. According to the article, the discovery of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch by Charles Moore in 1997 inspired Slat to develop the Ocean Cleanup machine in 2011. The article states that Slat’s design functions as colossal floating booms that will entrap and gather waste which will allow for convenient disposal. He also made significant improvements to the design in hopes of increasing efficiency, reducing cost and saving time and effort. The Ocean Cleanup Foundation raised most of its fund from Silicon Valley. The revised design will be modular so that it can be scalable and operates independently. A former failed prototype provided insights to how Slat can improve on his design. He claims to have done extensive simulations on the booms and the Patch and estimated that tons of waste could be collected annually. Schiller learns about Slat’s long-term plans during a conversation in which he hopes to recycle the plastic waste into marketable products to finance the project. While Slat’s idea of building the Ocean Cleanup machine will improve the pollution in ocean, it fails to address the source of the problem of illegal dumping.
Firstly, Slat should had done an in-depth study to the problem of the ocean pollution. ChartsBin statistics collector team (2011) showed that 163 out of 195 countries studied had contributed to 98 million tonnes of illegal dumping. This illegal dumping will eventually end up in ocean by weather. The purpose of the ocean clean-up is to allow the marine ecosystem to recover, save the earth and preserve our food source but without stopping illegal dumping it is driving the pollution to a point of no return. The article did not mention where the source of the majority of the waste from as such that readers assume that they are from activity carried out on the ocean hence leading the readers to expect the ocean will be cleaned once the machine is deployed. Without the clear picture of the source of pollution, people will continue illegal dumping and the ocean will remain polluted.
Secondly, plastics are the main pollutants in illegal dumping and they end up in the ocean either uncollected, left out from the waste collection system or illegal dumping into river or sea. National Geographic (2010) highlighted that for plastics to be completed biodegrade is almost impossible. Dr Serena Teo (2018) had found out that plastics will break down into Nano size and trapped in marine’s creature which cannot be collected by the machine. This had proved that the machine is incompetent to clean up the ocean properly and the only way to solve the plastic problem is to start from preventing illegal dumping that was not stated in the article. Since the source of the ocean pollution was not mentioned, readers will not correlate illegal dumping with pollution in the ocean hence the machine will never clean up the ocean.
Lastly, Alo. B.T. (2018) listed some of the water pollutants such as pathogens and organic and inorganic materials that are not able to be detected easily yet they can cause the severe health problems in humans. These pollutants are from human or animal waste, heavy industrial activities and decomposition of living organisms. They are the common waste that is been illegally dumped. Failing to discuss illegal dumping in the article cause the readers to be unaware of the bad practices of unhygienic sanitary, untreated waste from heavy industries and illegal dumping of caresses or corpse into the ocean is polluting the ocean.
On top of deploying a machine to clean the ocean, we should focus more on policy, education, research and development and regulation to reduce illegal dumping. This mammoth effort has to begin with the governments to regulate waste management and encourage the use of renewable materials.
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James Tan 