To those commenting that the Ocean Cleanup does somewhat customise their solution to different rivers and are in fact making a (small) difference to plastic pollution (and not claiming to be _the_ solution): you're missing the point. At no point do I say the interceptors don't clean up floating plastic. They do what they're designed to do. The point of this video is that _better_ solutions are known, and further will actually accomplish the TeamSeas goal of significantly reducing ocean plastic pollution (with the nice benefit of also cleaning up rivers). As Dr Schutte says: why settle for less than the best solution?
In your video you are claiming that what the OCean Clean UP project is doing wrong precisely because - as you claim in your video- they have a one-stop solution- which they as you claim here do not have. again, you make the argument as if ocean clean up is claiming to be the best solution, while in fact they are not. Secondly, if there are better solutions , you could have spend your 20-minute video on highlighting those solutions- and paint a more realistic picture regarding those solutions - as waste mangement and recycling is not something that is easy to do on a global scale (and def. cannot be done for the amount of investment of the Team Seas project), and you have not provided much alternative methods to clean up plastics on river beds/flood plains either.
@@Geth270 (1) It basically comes down to lobbying for laws and regulations that prevent companies from throwing garbage into the environment in the first place, and (2) there is no silver bullet for removing the existing plastic from the environment. Every ecosystem will require its own solution. I am sure that you can probably reuse components from system to system, but essentially you have to create a custom solution for every ecosystem. (3) Dr. Schutte mentions a report by the PEW organisation (reference 11) which lists various solutions that together can reduce the amount of plastic that flows into the ocean significantly. All of these points were mentioned in the video.
This video is great, because the problems with the interceptor are even inherent in one of their videos, the one you were using clips of in this video where he plays basketball with the locals.. They go talk to the locals about why they dump stuff in the river. Turns out they don't have bins or any form of waste management, and basically dump stuff on the floor which then flows into the river when it rains. And then they proceed to do nothing about it, and go back to the interceptor.
Local governments need to create and maintain effective wage management systems. This charity is merely reducing the impact of these systematic failures until solutions are finally implemented.
@@qascarface To follow up your thoughts here, I can't see any way to 'force' these societies to change their ways short of the ol' United States Diplomacy (tm) method of destroying and overwriting entire systems of government through war. Even sending multiple times their GDP as 'aid' dedicated toward public awareness and waste management programs won't solve the problem. It's well-known that picking up trash is only as helpful as a band-aid, while adjusting human mindsets and governmental processes is the real solution - it's just that a non-profit can't make these changes, even with unlimited budget.
Yeah but there’s not all that much these guys can do about that, save getting into local politics. They’re doing what they can within their sphere of control.
@@leighbee13 that's my biggest issue with this video. Yes you should tackle the problem at the source, but for one thing they dont need to be exclusive you can do both things, and also the "source" isnt attainable by teamseas. They don't have power over the politicians and local governments who should invest in these waste management systems.
I'm all for science and innovation, but if a "low tech" solution is cheaper and more efficient (as well as proven) then I'd rather prefer using that instead of flashy new things. The worst offenders are those who try to reinvent trains and just end up with shittier, but more sparkly trains.
@@-p2349 Bro what, this video is about the ocean cleanup and it isnt effective, thats the point of the video. The video supports the ocean conservency which doesnt use the stupid boats
Like many others said, ocean cleanup isn't the solution, but it's definitely helps! The worst thing we can do, is do nothing while we argue about some perfect solution that will never be perfect.
It's great to stop the source, that is a huge task that hasn't been achieved with recycling campaigns. it must. The problem with your video is that your calling it a black and white issue, that people won't invest or contribute to the source. These can be worked together, you can inspire local governments to employ better recycling. $30 million won't make a dent in local water management for example all over the world. Where do you prioritise? Plastic waste is already out there so any plan to stop it at the source also needs to clean up what is there now. Ocean clean up isn't sexy as you say it's just getting a job done, and with scientific research. It's interesting to see this perspective, other solutions are available. But it comes off as bashing a workable practise such as "but they're not getting all plastic 😓" from the bottom of rivers. They're will need to be another solution for that too. PADI, www.padi.com/conservation/torchbearer attempt to clean the seas, because the issue is there now.
@@yeetyeet7070 @mrbeast cleaned the beach that day as a demonstration of what it takes to clean a beach. The project is much larger, have a look at the good work at ocean cleanup. Why would it be counter productive? For the Beach example, I can assume the rubbish returned which would be a constant battle when not fixed at the source by at least it has less rubbish.
This isn’t related to the topic, but thank you so much for having such good subtitles. The colour coding for different speakers is especially helpful. I’m personally not hard of hearing, I just watch videos in loud environments sometimes, but I have friends who are, so having great and amazingly accessible videos to recommend them is always amazing. Thank you.
I spotted a few mistakes in the subtitles though, they are mostly okay but sometimes they get some words or phrases wrong and end up being a bit confusing.
@@danims7329 Oh, they aren’t perfect, a few spots threw me for a loop for a second like you say. But the vast majority of UA-camrs, even ones with otherwise very high production quality, just don’t bother with subtitles, leaving us with UA-cam’s autogenerated captions which are… sub-par, to say the least. The fact that Simon thought of it, and opted for colour coded subtitles on top of that, puts him far ahead of most channels in this regard.
Yeah - reminds me of Tom Scott's subtitles, with the colour-coding (defaulting to white for speaker 1, yellow for speaker 2) and everything. My guess is that they use the same company (Caption+) to caption their video.
Brutally honest and informative. A key feature I keep seeing is there is a lot of focus is on "solutions" that look cool, rather than being honest with ourselves and focus on what actually works.
Absolutely. I may have slightly pulled my punches in the video, but I think my biggest problem with the interceptors is their emphasis on looking good in promo material rather than their efficacy. It's so damaging to actually fixing this problem.
@@SimonClark Like you said in the video: the upstream process is so much more important to attack: using less plastic/don't dump plastic in the river to begin with!
The reason is: Using new technology to clean up is the easy solution that doesn't require us to change our habit. It suggest that we can go on like this because we can remove the harmful stuff afterwards. However: It's exactly what is written here: a cleanup and those are always imperfect. No cleanup in the world will get everything. The more efficient, cost effective and long term solution would be: Not producing easily discardable plastics in the first place -- nay! Not producing easily discardable stuff in general. For example the ban on one time use drinking straws has spurred a massive industry in almost as bad replacements, from paper, to bamboo.
When Ocean Cleanup was only working on cleaning up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, they were criticized for ignoring river pollution. OC responded by aggressively pursuing their river Interceptor initiative - now criticized here, in turn. It's true the Interceptors don't address the greatest causes of pollution: 1) use of plastics in short-lived consumer and industrial goods, and 2) failure of nations - many poor and corrupt - to invest adequately in waste management facilities. Unfortunately, these largest causes of pollution are driven by considerations far beyond the reach of an organization like the OC.
Removing that garbage patch made sense, something like this is the only way that's ever going to happen. The rivers are best handled by reducing the amount of plastic created, increasing the portion of the plastic that is created that gets properly recycled, and making it as easy as possible for regular people to ensure that their plastics are being properly disposed of.
That's true, but one of the points of this video was that this initiative drains public attention and finances out from more effective solutions. It is not bad what they are doing, but they could combine their efforts with others teams to prevent pollution of the rivers rather than cleaning them this way. Bad things they are popularizing least effective method. It is also not far beyond the reach of an organization like OC who has massive influencers supporting them, don't underestimate internet communities, they can do a lot if really motivated =)
@@crazytushkan4022 THat isn't even true. Most of the young people who follow Mr Beast and Mark Rober will probably never give another penny or thought into that issue because now it will go to science and they will be bored out of their minds about it. They helped because these two men helped them care and showed them that there was something small they could do and convinced them that doing something was better than doing nothing. But people came out and said that doing something was just as bad as doing something. Maybe worse. So nothing it is. But it was cool to believe in something for a few minutes.
1. Billion dollar corporations produce plastics. 2. Billion dollar corporations ship plastics all over the world. 3. Billion dollar corporations sell plastics to billions of people. 4. Even in wealthy countries, like America with so-so trash management, the buying public throws the plastic trash on the ground. 5. Everyone blames the poor first. 6. 1970’s Woodsy Owl starts complaining about pollution. 7. The cycle begins again.
We have i think 3 of the floaty conveyor things here in Malaysia on the Klang River. I have lived in the general area of the river pretty much my whole life and pass it quite frequently and honestly the thing seems to be doing its work. The river appears cleaner and the water looks nicer. It still smells like a road gutter, but it's a step in the right direction
Why aren't they just pouring a small layer of gasoline on these rivers and just light it on fire? It would burn all the plastic in one shot! If you manage to remove all the plastic from the water it doesn't really help because the plastic isn't disappearing, you are still stuck with it so it just moves the problem somewhere else. And if gasoline isn't working good enough then we can drop napalm from planes and helicopters, this should be pretty effective!
@@Reth_Hard That's like Burning the trash inside your house instead of throwing them away destined for the Landfill or Recycling plant. Yes the trash is gone, but the bad smell and toxic byproducts remains for you to breath in.
I think this is a microcosm of the biggest problem surrounding how we deal with environmental issues, our inability to upset the status quo in any way. Essentially unchecked progress in technology has resulted in plastic waste everywhere, loss of habitats and climate change. Instead of approaches - informed by science - that could mitigate impact in the first place there is a desire for a new technical solution that will simply make the problem go away. Technology is not magic, Marvel is not real. We have had the knowledge and technology for DECADES for all energy production to be green but doing that transition would have funnelled power and wealth away from those who had it. We have the solutions for plastic waste, we're just incapable of sacrificing anything to make it happen, instead let's hope a magic boat will sort it out instead.
Not just environmental issues. The idea that hand wave innovation will fix every issue eventually and we don't have to worry has become far too prevalent. Whether it is environmental issues, city planning or energy. It's very convenient for people who believe in the status quo. But closing your eyes to the issues and convincing yourself somehow everything will fix itself is not going to help anyone.
@@johnmaris1582 this is not true, you can see some recent developments in Africa in green energy for example, and as time goes on and fossil fuels are further depleted, and green energy technology advances, fossil fuels will get more expensive while green energy gets cheaper. Try again
Keep in mind that The Interceptors are only half of what the Ocean Cleanup does. The other half right now is focusing on cleaning the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and there has already been some good progress. However, it may have the same problems as the Interceptors as you addressed. But at the end of the day, we should still be grateful for both of these solutions because they are still better than nothing~
as of today they have collected a little over 100 000 by the ocean clean up. Annually we put 4.3 Billion kg in to the ocean. This means what they have collected is the equivalent of what we put into the ocean every 15 minutes. And the amount is projected to double by 2034. This is the sad reality, what they are doing is not just less effective it's completely negligible. Don't get me wrong I donated to team seas before I knew this and I thought I was helping with the solution, it's unfortunately not the case, ocean clean up is not a part of the solution. It's just simply to ineffective, it's less then a rounding error, it distracts from real solutions.
Well Great Pacific Garbage is not some kind of island of garbage most of the plastic in there is scared and pea sized. And they are actually doing more harm than good while trying to fish plastic in there. With the numbers they provide in 2023 it will take around 24.000 Years to clean all the plastic in our oceans im not even including the future plastics that will end up in ocean. We need better solution for the problem. This is like bucketing out water from a sinking ship. Except you actually have a tea spoon instead.
The issue with any other possible solutions to waste-management - like producing less waste or disposing it in a responsible way - is that people just don't do it. Look at places where there are a number of trashbins after a festival (keeping in mind that in those areas there often are none) and you'll often find the bin half-empty and trash lying around 3m from it ... Of course that would be better, but we have to go with what can be done, not with what we wish would be done ... that would be similar to some party or other in Germany calling out for immediate peace in other parts of the world! Unrealistic!
Preventing *more* plastic and other waste entering our water ways is definitely the way to go. But...sooner rather than later we also need mechanisms to remove the plastic that is already out there. Ideally we'll want to do this before plastic decomposes into micro plastic as removing *that* is an even tougher nut to crack.
I respect the place you're arguing from, but saying that interceptors "don't work" is overly critical. While it may be more ecologically beneficial to prevent additional trash from entering river systems when compared to removing trash that is already there, *It is still valuable to take out the trash that is already there*. While select rivers may have subsurface plastics as the majority component, surface plastic is still the most prevalent in river systems according to current data, and interceptors effectively remove it. There is space for both waste management efforts to reduce waste entering rivers AND intercepts to take out plastic that is already there. This is a good initiative.
I think his point was scale. There is *so* much plastic flowing into the oceans that capturing it requires far more customization and consideration for the local environment *and* even if you do that, this isn't enough to capture a sizable percentage of the ocean fouling plastic.
@@x--. I would ask critical people like these that criticize people trying to help how many pounds of trash and debris they themselves have removed from the oceans. It's easy to be judgmental while also putting nothing into practice
@@joshua_J I don't think that is their intention. I feel that they just want to make it more effeicnt and help more people (more trash removed /$), not trying to say that the people that are helping are bad.
@@joshua_J if I write a law the requires a 20% reduction in plastic water bottles, how many pounds is that? Or better yet, if I lobby for a law that requires gov't trash cans every 50ft near waterways, how many? Or if I petition for trash collection in the slums on the city some? How many then?
Thank you for clearly articulating this obvious point/video rebuttable. Seriously. Like cmon, this is just clickbate video. One solution/effort being more effective than another doesn’t make the first effort “not work”. This video, somewhat disingenuously, implies that there cannot be efforts to prevent and cleanup in tandem. Smh
The interceptors are considered a "band aid" until the trash systems in those areas are improved, they weren't made as an end all solution and they explained that very much so in their videos.
Yeah this video just seemed like a bunch of people who are upset that they don't have the money to do anything about it, so they decided to trash the two people who are trying to do something about it.
Yeah, this video makes it like if doesn’t solve the cause it’s not worth solving. Yes, there are places where the garbage disposal is not proper, guess what you can’t do anything about it because of the local government. Yes, it’s a band aid, but when you need one you need one.
@@nicholasgeogalas2934 The proper place to place the blame is on the manufacturers for producing so much of it and doing so in a way that makes it hard to dispose of while lying to customers about the efficacy of recycling. One thing that has given me some hope was when Ball started to sell aluminum cups with only a tiny amount of plastic used to protect against aluminum exposure. They are very easily recycled and there's an established method of recycling them in most areas. Even where there isn't an established recycling system, you'd still be able to mine the local landfills for the aluminum later on as aluminum is incredibly resistant to corrosion once it gets that layer of aluminum oxide on it. Ultimately, solutions like that are going to have to be where much of the focus is as aluminum can be recycled pretty much forever with just energy being lost each time. I think the cups are something like 99% aluminum.
@@SmallSpoonBrigade "The proper place to place the blame is on the manufacturers" Not ONLY the manufacturers, but consumers as well. There ARE non-packaging stores! YOU HAVE AN OPTION..... But I guess society just likes comfortable, sanatised one use Containers?!
@@TheCpadron19 missed the point. it's actually the reverse of what you are saying. The critics aren't trashing the "temporary solution" while doing nothing. They are lamenting a situation where the better solution is available, but because of hip, shiny tech we won't get to those. In the public's perception, this isn't a temporary fix, because it looks high-tech and cool, which is the reason investors go for this option (publicity and glamour, wow-factor). That tech-based future-optimism is actually preventing real solutions.
Ok, so you've explained very well why the interceptors are not an optimal solution: 1. they only collect on the surface and 2. the plastic that goes into the ocean is a tiny fraction of all plastic. You've stated three times, that the problem needs to solved at the roots, which is a platitude. Unfortunately, by only mentioning the alternatives and not explaining the science behind them, you've effectively reproduced the campaign of TeamSeas. As a viewer, I would like to know, what the better solutions would be and how they would compare against the interceptors. It feels like a missed opportunity to not talk about them...
Mmm yea, I noticed that too. I'm guessing that they never want to go into the specifics of a solution because that would make the video too long and people would lose interest.
He also said multiple times that solutions change for each location because they each have different problems. At most you can blame him for not giving an example, but the main point of the video is that there isn't a magical, fix-all tech, and you seem to have missed it.
I was waiting for example of a better solution of the problem, but he never said them XD, it feels like a manipulation mostly becasue of the fact that there is not even a one example of a solution that we could compere to team sea interceptors :/
Exactly, even if these interceptors clean a tiny percentage of plastic, it still makes a difference. But, also they barely mentioned the other organization "Ocean Conservancy", which does work with the government
@@heychrisfox right the non profits job is to raise awareness of the issue Also some parties believe in little government interference like conservatives so this is more than somebody making a video about what he doesn’t like about the work that others do. He needs to do something himself.
@@moniquewrites9046 To be clear, non-profits only job is not to raise awareness. Just like these non-profits, they have actual boots on the ground doing good work. And they're one of many different NGOs doing great work across the planet to solve these issues. Commentary, by itself, is the problem specifically. This guy can offer lots of theoretical ideas, but if they're not based in practicality, then they're just that: theories.
As someone already said don't try to find a single/ simple solution for a complex problem. The interceptors are not "the" solution for river plastic but rather "a" solution.
Personally I never took it that the interceptors were any type of ‘solution’ to plastic pollution, just a way to reduce plastic pollution, and they certainly do do that. Now even such as 1% of plastic pollution is a lot of plastic for this worlds amount of plastic pollution, so while sure it might not sound like a lot, it still ends up being a pretty good amount of plastic.
And river clean up is something that needs to be done , it's not a pointless solution river polution can cause floods , affect wild life significantly , which ends up affecting fishing that affects the whole community , of course we need to target the problem in its roots , but that doesnt mean we dont also have to target river clean up, unfortunelly the video was very short sighted in this regard .
Yes but the point is we have finite resources and funding and we have better tech and solutions we should be investing in. The money from team seas would be better invested elsewhere. Thats the point
Proper garbage disposal normally falls under the purview of local government. Let me know when the NGOs are running for office to really solve the problem. In the meantime, I’d still like my rivers cleaned up please.
Perhaps, but spending that same money to pressure companies to not produce so much pointless plastic, improve recycling techniques for plastic that can't be avoided and educate people about how to dispose of the plastics would make an actual difference. WIthout that, it doesn't much matter how much of the easy to remove plastics you remove, it's not going to make a dent in the problem.
A big problem with the alternative solutions you didn't really address....the counties responsible for a lot of the river based plastic waste don't have particularly strong environmental agencies that can push for customized solutions at the source of waste...it's very easy to say X should be done, but if large corps have effectively bought environmental regulatory bodies in other countries, nothing will actually happen This argument also seems to indicate the interceptor is a completely finished system that will receive no updates over it's lifetime, and never improve in efficacy or price
That argument isn't unique to the alternative solutions; the same can be said for the Interceptors. In this case, the reason it wasn't brought up is because it applies to everything pretty much equally. The same could be said about cultural ideas on environmental preservation, thoughts on technology, or available funding.
The problem is those countries can’t afford to do anything even if they did have an EPA. The people throwing garbage in rivers aren’t big cooperations you can fine and get them to change; they are poor people living in shacks who pollute because they can’t afford to go to the dump. How do you get them to care about the ocean when they are days away from starving or dying of disease
well, there are already better methods of cleaning up plastic than using these interceptors, so why wait for such updates or "improvements" to the interceptor if you could have been using a better method and efficient technology for doing it now?
Spoiler alert, they don't. The video just emphasized that it's complicated and complex "that they should stop it from the source" blah blah blah. He kept mentioning this better way and better science without mentioning what made those solutions complicated other than geography. Normally there should be pros and cons, but when you made it just purely negative other than it gives clout to ocean plastic. It just comes off as biased.
The main point of those machines is to build hype over the fact someone cares enough to make a change. This in turn creates more funding for more ambitious projects. It's far from a perfect solution as the creator has stated, but it's a start.
@@biji_honi "yeah like "your solution is not good enough, and we not gonna do anything about it or the actual problem"" nope. More like; "why would you choose to go this route, when they are better possibilities out there, and those solutions are widely documented..." The answer is; it looks cool. So not "we are not going to do anything" but "why don't you do somlething that actually works. There's a difference.
I have a few problems with this video: #1. The alternative solution proposed in this video is essentially subsidized garbage collection services in 3rd world countries. This is not a $15 million problem, more like a $90 billion problem. Charities do not have the capital required for this kind of investment. On this front the Ocean Conservancy mostly does advocacy. #2. So what if The Ocean Cleanup is doing the "easy part" of removing floating plastic from rivers. If no one else is doing that job, then it is undoubtedly a net benefit. Note, the much touted Ocean Conservancy does essentially the same thing with their beach cleanups, just with more manual labor. #3. 15:23 why was this necessary? It only diminishes your point and makes you seem like a hater. In conclusion, Team Seas is doing advocacy for healthier oceans by donating to The Ocean Conservancy while also doing the flashier but nonetheless helpful work of actually picking up garbage with The Ocean Cleanup. As you said yourself, they donated equally to BOTH charities. Why must we always be so cynical, just enjoy good people doing good things for once. Edit: I think my comment keeps getting deleted because I was trying to post hyperlinks to sources. You can find my facts online on the Ocean Conservancy website.
The problem isn't that The Ocean Cleanup is causing net harm, it's that they're effecting net good *very* inefficiently on a plastic removed per dollar basis. Team Seas is doing good work, but partnering with The Ocean Cleanup is not as effective as some of the other things they could have done. 1. Yup. It's a $90 billion problem. Or something like that. Which is why allocating what you *do* get as best as possible, is so important. Advocacy isn't enough, you have to get the ball rolling and rolling as fast you can. 2. Again, just because it's a good as in better than bad does not mean it's good as in *good* full stop. Improvement over doing nothing is not enough. Dusting the ants off a moldy piece of bread before eating it is better for you than with, going to therapy to overcome your moldy bread addiction is actually good for you. 3. It's a clip that points to a more inherent problem with their attitudes, is it not? What Simon says is true, it's a very literal description of what happened.
@@metroidisprettycool119 Yet everybody is talking about it, and mostly about the ocean cleanup, even if everybody would say 'they do a bad job' it might motivate more people to work against plastic polution. It's easy to critique what's out there, but if they are the biggest and most known, you must wonder why.. if others are so much better, it should be easy to promote.
@@metroidisprettycool119 I never said people were claiming The Ocean Cleanup is causing net harm. My point is that a 15 million dollar investment will do nothing to affect the systemic change required to solve this problem. You need millions of dollars of SUSTAINED investment to do that, i.e. subsidized garbage disposal. Therefore, instead of trying to compare The Ocean Cleanup to what governmental organizations can accomplish, it is only fair to compare them to other charities, i.e. The Ocean Conservancy, which, as stated above, does no better in terms of actual debris removed from the ocean (they simply do not have the necessary funds, i.e. billions of dollars). tldr: It is unfair to compare what The Ocean Cleanup can do on a small budget to what governmental organizations can accomplish with billions (in terms of efficiency and net benefit).
@@black_forest_ for me donating kept me more invested in the issue since then I collect plastic several times a week when I go outdoors. Your comment sound very filled with anti capitalistic energy. I think a lot of charity work of big companies isn't always so self centered I talked to someone who worked in a department of a big company which was dedicated for charity projects and they had a lot of freedom to spend their budget. Maybe coca cola doesn't plan with maleficent intent were their 0,01 % of money goes when it's for a good cause as long as their name is written on it.
Missed the point totally; this video never states "“it’s not the best solution so just do nothing”" They say "by doing this, it takes money, effort and attention away from the solutions that already exist and are better"
@@brmbkl The solutions that already exist and are better but are not being used to do anything about the plastic problem. If Ocean Cleanup uses money that "could" be used toward other efforts and actually cleans up the plastic what's the problem? These other solutions have been in place but have not been cleaning up or at the least not bringing awareness to the fact that our oceans and rivers are littered with tons of waste. Makes people think before they throw their plastic in the trash vs the recycle.
@@brmbkl Except it doesn't. Taking the money and attention away from the solutions that already exist implies that that they would've generated this same level of interest, which they have not. Although I agree with the premise of better solutions existing, my problem with this video is a lack of any quantification for the audience. What "solution" is waved over our heads in the video that is 80% effective, what is the cost of this solution. A solution costing 100x for 80% efficacy will most certainly not even survive with the limited funding that the interceptors work off of ($770,000 per Interceptor).
Ocean cleanup went through a bunch of iterations and is planning for more, I feel it's kind of unfair to try and declare these guys useless when they haven't even gone through a whole iteration yet.
As someone from a developing country: While I agree with some points here, I also completely disagree with some points. The 'better solution' that has been mentined here all share significant problems: they are all complex solutions at best -- or hopelessly idealistic solution at worst. Yes, there's no single silver bullet to every problem. But the solution here has some significant advantages: It's flashy for marketing purpose, it's easily quantifiable, has an easily visible output, and does NOT require complex coordination with locals. That last point is actually a good point. Of course, stopping trashes from entering the river in the first place is a much better solution than stopping it in a single point before ocean. That solution is an obvious solution, but in reality it's a solution that is not a good solution for campaigns such as this in developing countries such as mine. 1. Improving/adding local landfill is the best solution that indeed we have to add as a priority, but even that still require much more significant cooperation with local government. Government (especially LOCAL government, not national level government) can be a really difficult entity for cooperation, and is not something that effectively solved by a crowdfunding campaign (you can't simply throw money to fix it). 2. There are a lot of logistic problems with moving trashes to said local landfills. 3. There are a lot of problems with people not putting trashes in the supposed place in the first place. Let alone sorting or recycling it. 4. There are a lot of problems with people throwing trashes to the rivers/waterway directly, and laws for this are not being enforced at all, etc. I'm not saying those examples shouldn't/couldn't be tackled, there have been some improvements in those areas afterall. But they are really poor goals for big crowdfundings such as this. Cooperating with local governments is not only hard, but is also a source for ineffectiveness and corruptions. It's really hard to measure how effective the money are spent (compared to simple 1 dollar = x of trashes taken out). It will take a long time for the goal to be actually achieved. A lot of the process are not really visible and will need to be applied in a lot of places that you can't see all at once (compared to just observing one boat chugging trashes in a single point). My other criticism is that the video repeats so many times that the ocean cleanup is not effective, but it doesn't tell how ineffective it is in a quantifiable comparison. Some of the other proposed 'solutions' are what I categorized as 'hoplessly idealistic'. Having companies to reduce or stop plastic production for packaging and battling against the force of economics and the lack of political will? Yeah, I don't think a youtube campaign could set that as a goal. Again, we could and need to do them. #TeamSeas could attempt and bring more attentions to those solutions, but I believe that the current campaign is already pretty good and going with the 'perfect solution' would likely bring needless complexity and made the communication worse. We need to promote the 'perfect solution' as a long-term goal that we need to keep tackle after the crowdfunding, but a temporary solution such as this is perfectly fine. As many has pointed out: Perfect is the enemy of done.
Excellent points. I just wrote a comment to this sort of effect. Without your having to read through my entire dissertation, I basically said that setting Rober and Donaldson's goals equal in problem resolution to those made by the U.N., governments, or corporations is barking up the wrong tree. I stated that MrBeast and Mark Rober are simply trying to tackle a visible problem that people can rally behind. Sure, a good chunk of plastic is unseen 20 feet down or deep in a river bed, and therefore, Rober and Donaldson are not tackling the source. But again, that's not the purpose of their crowdfunding campaign. I basically categorized human action into three levels: 1. actual action by the people, 2. action based on heavy research, science, and backing by governments and corporations, 3. prevention of future pollution through policies, fines, systems, and infrastructures. Clearly, Team Seas was tackling number 1, not numbers 2 and 3.
I actually really like the quote „Perfect is the enemy of done“. Thanks for sharing it, it’s actually really true, if you want something to be perfect you might never end up finishing because there’s always stuff to improve
He seems to be conflating 2 completely different issues in the video, the cause and the cleanup. Both need to be address. But saying that their solution to cleanup is faulty because it doesn't address the cause is mind numbingly backwards. And then suggesting that the improvement to their method would be to stop the source just compounds the confusion. Thats like a coke delivery guy dropping a pallet of cans on the store floor and having them explode all over and instead of cleaning it up his solution is to never deliver coke there again. There you go problems solved no coke will ever be spilled here again, except we still have tons of coke all over the floor that needs to be cleaned up. Not delivering coke there didn't solve the stores problem.
Thanks for a great post. And yes, Simon Clark has enough education under his belt to know that "quantifiable" is a thing. I suspect this video is about Simon Clark.
My main question with this video is 1) Do the better solutions make use of money as well? It's all very well to say we need systematic change - we do - but you can't achieve systematic change with a few million dollars. You can buy a robot to lower the amount of plastic waste entering the ocean. 2) Is it diverting reasorces that would better be used elsewhere? Or is it generating new investment into plastic reduction that otherwise would not exist? I.E. Is it actually competing with other solutions, or is it just existing on top of them. There's a lot of people who will donate to a shiny technological solution that otherwise couldn't be pursuaded to help
Exactly. See my diatribe I posted recently as well. I question the motives in the creation of this video a lot, because, as you noticed, there are some false comparisons being made.
1) Yes better solutions need money, but a big scientific study from 2020 found that "we can cut annual flows of plastic into the ocean by about 80% in the next 20 years by applying existing solutions and technologies." So why not put $15 mil (The River Cleanup's cut), toward those already-known solutions? IMO if we're going to spend money, it should be toward the proven-to-work stuff, not for a stopgap. 2) The answer is actually yes to both your questions, but in a really unsavory way. Team Seas vouches for The Ocean Cleanup to a whole bunch of followers, who may then continue to donate to Team Seas or The Ocean Cleanup into the future (diverting resources away from other solutions). Team Seas/The Ocean Cleanup also serves as a "greenwashing" mechanism for companies who want to invest in plastic reduction in a way that doesn't require them to actually contribute to long-term solutions, while still looking like they're doing good for the environment. For example, Coca Cola has a terrible (documented) track record of actively squashing recycling initiatives and consistently not meeting/moving the goalposts on what they say they'll do for plastic reduction in-house, but they're one of the Interceptor's biggest backers. In that case, they otherwise can't be persuaded to help AND SO they are donating to a shiny technological solution.
@@vgwschutte Even thou I'm aware of the greenwashing been made by companies on partnership like Coca-Cola, its pretty bad and unapologetic, I'm not convinced it doesn't have a net positive toward conservation. It's hard to me to imagine that this kind of campaign would actually hurt others instead of maybe boosting them. Sure, they won't be solving shit themselves but this campaign wouldn't have gotten as big without their marketing focus and I feel like we can at least start the conversation more seriously to a lot of people. Just my perception.
@@vgwschutte I've got a few issues with this video. While I think it has a point, it tends to shy away from revealing better solutions in favor of criticizing the way things are. For example, I noticed your 80% statistic was taken from the video, and it notes that there are better solutions. So, the question becomes "what are those better solutions and technologies?" The video doesn't really answer that question beyond saying systematic change. Also, I think the video is very misleading with these statistics. For example there was that statistic that sayed only 2% of plastic makes it into the ocean (that number may be wrong, Im going from memory), which is misleading because it accounts for all plastic pollution whereas Team Seas is specifically looking at water based plastic pollution (particularly that of the ocean). Ots small details like that that can really mislead the audience and that detract from his argument.
@@vgwschutte Existing [obvious and very hard] solutions according to PEW: 1) Reduce plastic production growth to eliminate all avoidable plastic use 2) Design recycling-friendly products for the unavoidable uses 3) Increase mechanical recycling capacity 4) Build better temporary disposal facilities 5) Substitute plastic for alternatives 6) Improve waste collection in middle- and low-income countries 7) Develop plastic-to-plastic chemical conversions (i.e. not yet existing solution) 8) Reduce plastic waste exports All PEW thinks we need to do it is $70B, plus making big changes to major industries, and making major policy changes in all countries. Yup, sounds easy. Especially considering that $0.015B was raised for Ocean Cleanup, and that industries are governed mostly by financials (and laws), not (scientific) opinions. These solutions have probably been known for several decades.
I've seen these interceptor style things working in rivers and even if it's only getting 40% of the plastic in the river, thats still a ton of plastic. They were literally swapping out dumpsters because they were getting filled up quickly. Is it a perfect solution? 100% not. But its still a good idea. Let these take on the easy pickin's surface plastics while getting the message out regarding polluting and then work on a new tech for submersed plastics. Who knows. Some kid seeing that will then start to pick up 5 pieces of trash a day.
This same logic goes for almost every global non profit issue. It's more important to spread the message of "Hey this problem matters and we actually could fix it" Even the best nonprofit's have a marketed solution that doesn't solve the overall problem. Whether it's saving trafficked girls to planting trees, none of it actually does anything to solve the REAL issue, it mostly just raises awareness for people to care and feel it IS possible to stop, and must be stopped.
But the problem with showing „simple“ solutions like that is that most people will donate to the cause and then feel like they’ve done their part How many people who donated to teamseas actually ended up reducing their own plastic waste? I would bet that at least 90% of people are still using single use plastic regularly and aren’t trying to actively avoid it at the very least
@@NA-yq4pe as much as it sucks, thats pretty much all you can do other than being politically active. Personal responsibility only goes so far. Even if Im willing to give all my time and effort towards a cause I just won't have much of an effect
@@NA-yq4pe Being honest with the public on how much needs to be done to solve the problem will just make them give up. Most of what needs to be done is political and right now nearly everyone feels powerless on that front. Having hard working people raise 15 million is great but we need world governments to invest trillions and I don't see that being done until millennials rule the world in around 20 years. We will eventually fix things but the people in power know they will die before things get too bad for them and just don't care. I have actually heard people in their 70s say that it wont matter in their lifetime so they don't worry about it.
I think you misunderstood the project. Half of the money is spend on taking waste out of the ocean and the other half is spend on trying to reduce the amount of waste going into the ocean. The aim wasn’t to clean up rivers and it wasn’t to put a robot at the end of every river but to stop most of the pollution coming from areas with no waste management. (Till local governments or the UN can provide waste management) If that does cut the amount of waste entering the ocean in half es the guy from the Netherlands said, then this is a huge success. *And no, I somehow doubt that the problem in the poorest of regions is large plastic waste leaking through. It’s obviously through away stuff in these areas causing most of the pollution. Your research is undoubtedly true yet it doesn’t reflect the purpose and the successes of these machines.
The entire point was that the taking the waste out part was grossly ineffective use of resources and possible has negative knock-on effects that could negate attempts to reduce waste going in.
@@tams805 the whole point was to miss characterize a few studies and to be pedantic, the 2% figure mentioned was more all plastic pollution and was used to criticize a project working only on ocean pollution, that plus the title is obvious click bait
@@loukasfrantzolas6494 yep that’s also he’s just trying to increase his following I don’t like how he portrayed mark and mr. Beast as incompetent this was insulting
Let's criticize people who are actually doing something about the problem while offering no better solutions other then idealized blue sky wishful thinking. Great video.
Everything you say the ocean cleanup should be doing, is what they're doing as far as I've seen. I've seen them talk about stopping the plastic waste at the true source, but that's a much harder problem, that's better handled by the local government. I'm pretty sure I've seen them working on solutions that can stop plastic deeper in the river. What you think are bad aspects of ocean cleanup is IMO good: 1. Doing flashy but less effective projects that give them attention and funding.. they started with the great pacific garbage patch because it's headline grabbing. But they clearly followed the science and started tackling rivers first. Again, the interceptor isn't the most effective, but it's a useful solution to some problems and it's headline grabbing. 2. They're making solutions we're going to need eventually. We should clean up the great pacific garbage patch eventually and we might as well start developing solutions now. 3. They're clearly moving in the direction of what science says we should focus on. But they're not letting scientific idealism get in the way doing what it takes to get funding, which should always be their #1 priority.
Put another way, if we do have effective solutions for stopping plastic at the source, and others are working at that... isn't it good that they're working on one of the problems the rest aren't? The great pacific garbage patch is still a problem, even if it isn't the biggest one. We can work at multiple things in parallel. And your video isn't bad either, I mean we *should* use TeamSeas and OceanCleanup to funnel more attention to all ocean/river cleanup projects. It motivated me to find and donate to a local cleanup project.
This is a fantastic video, however on the point of "lower income countries focusing on improving waste collection" is literal insanity, the primary issue is that countries in the developed world have been shipping our waste to poorer nations under the guise of recycling for decades. Improving their waste management programs misses the fact that most of the garbage that is leaking into the oceans is imported from countries that do not want to process their own waste. Its such a big issue that many nations especially lower income nations have followed the Chinese example of outright banning the import of foreign waste, and many island nations such as the Philippines perform regular "trash audits" where they monitor that amount of trash that comes from different countries and issue fines to the companies that are importing it and try to spread awareness about how the plastic waste from the US/Canada/UK and Europe are some how showing up on their shores by the ton. Even looking at this from a cultural stand point, many if not most lower income countries especially Indian regions and south pacific countries were low yield, local production locations which relied on using reusable and sustainable packaging, single use plastic and mass produced goods are really only a thing that started showing up since the 80s in many of these places that are deemed to be heavy polluters. The only reason that single use plastics are showing up in these places at all is through western influence and corporate expansion, even in the modern developed nation single use plastics didn't hit their stride until the late 70s early 80s before then it was very common to be able to purchase what you needed with a container that would be returned cleaned and reused, milk bottles are a cultural meme, but everything used to work that way. The world's plastic waste problem is a global issue affecting 8 billion people, cause overwhelmingly by a few multi-national corporations that really only serve 1 billion people, and are trying to expand to 3-4 billion.
@@virtualalias That is why the interceptors exist. If you could just wave your hand and get people more concerned about plastic than..where there next meal is coming from, we would have done it already. And most poor nations will put up with multi0nationals as again..priorities.
Reminds me how a LOT of e waste end up in africa There are hacker groups who go around searching for e waste that still works to get information from the computers and either use it in direct attacks or blackmail
"the fact that most of the garbage that is leaking into the oceans is imported from countries that do not want to process their own waste" Citation needed for this claim.
While I think that stopping plastic from going in the ocean in the first place is very important you didn’t really propose another solution for plastic that has already entered the river. Organizing waste management on international scale is really difficult to do.
@@SuperSMT Great analogy. I would do neither of those things though. I would just stand there and keep telling my wife who's trying to prevent the sewage from flowing into the living room that she really should stop doing that and tackle the problem at the source.
Except the Ocean Cleanup is working incredibly hard to do that. Go to their channel and look at the podcast where they talk about it. It just doesn’t make for a good UA-cam video so no one has heard about it.
Assuming that that mission statement "We are going to remove [exactly] x amount of plastic from the ocean" is actually true, and they put funding into these organizations until that x amount of plastic was removed and then they stop, it makes no difference how efficient that removal was, as they would have removed that x amount of plastic wither way. I am aware that that sounds retarded, but If that is what they are going to advertise by, that's the conclusion I have to make. In reality, they probably won't operate like this and it does make a difference then.
@@duncanrobertson6472 That statement has so many underlying assumptions in it though. If you were talking about convincing one person to invest a fixed amount of money into some organization to reduce plastic pollution, then your statement would obviously true. But we're talking about 2 influencers and a small campaign team, trying to capture some attention of millions of people, motivating them to invest. So I think the conversion rate is very important. E.g. if they'd make a less capturing video it might have reached 10 or 100 times fewer people, and it'd hurt the influencers' pockets and career a lot more too. Their entire career relies on sustaining really high retention and CTR and can easily be lost.
@@duncanrobertson6472 the thing is using something that is unflashy is a problem since it doesn't look as good in UA-cam videos which would cause less donations over time. Flashy things bring more.money and more money mean a better ability to clean up
@@duncanrobertson6472 So why aren't all these filthy rich universities cleaning those 5 rivers? They clearly have the money. Instead of these academics bitching about someone else they should stop wasting billions on Administrators and actually demonstrate their superior versions?
By the time any solution gets implemented there will always be something more effective, it feels harsh to say things like this about an initiative that's actually doing something and actively working to try to fix an issue.
I find that the video very heavily criticises TeamSeas for doing a good thing that is not good enough and hints at solutions being complicated. So complicated that Simon himself can not actually mention any of them in the video itself. TeamSeas on the other hand was able to come up with something that people could take part in and start helping NOW, and at least bring awareness to the topic. In this video we are basically told that there are other more complex solutions that should be implemented, but does not give the view a real call to action. It's seem to me that Simon is letting perfect be the enemy of the good. The garbage collected by the interceptors is not adding that in the ocean = GOOD. Awareness of people that saw the video and who might try to help in someway = GOOD. Yes there is much more to do, but he seems to like bringing TeamSeas back as a punching bag when he did not really need to.
Its super frustrating to watch. He basically accuses the TeamSeas group of only doing it for publicity and not for actual change, where I guarantee if the $32 million raised went to pay governments to care more, would be 100% squandered and wasted at best, pilfered at worst. The solution was basically "Stupid rich white guys, quit telling us wat to do! The real way to fix it was to get every government in the world to magically care about pollution and then implement systematic change to properly handle plastic waste so it doesn't end up in the water to begin with." Like, no duh, Sherlock. But have you been paying attention to environmental causes for the last 50 years? If we could do that with $32 million, climate change would have been solved. You are not going to get permission to catch waste at every dumping side in a river, but you can at least prevent some outlet at the rivers mouth. Nobody thought this would stop ocean garbage, its a Band-Aid at best. I'd also argue that a large portion of the money raised was done so BECAUSE of the big shiny tech. Just like TeamTrees has drone planting bots. Is it the most practical? No. Does it draw attention and get donations? Yes. Then a portion of that money gained can go to a good cause. If the campaign was "Donate money to us so that we can use it to beg governments to provide trash services in disadvantaged countries that are already suffering from food scarcity, but the problem is really complex guys so just give us your money and we promise it will be put to the best use science will offer!" I doubt they would break a million. The TeamX program has always been about ACTION. That your money will go directly to a tangible thing and can be tracked as such. Nothing presented in this video provided that, and just came across and a spoiled guy mad about not getting the same exposure and saying he could have done it better.
He mention waste management many times. I disagree with this video as well in many points, but the solution was at least somewhat pointed out (waste management, contact experta etc.)
This does not hit the nail on the Head. The main issue posed is ''Why is solution X not solution Y, Y is better'' which is false dichotomy, this is a YES AND problem. Further, if solution Y is better, but Y is a collection of regionally-specific solutions, and X is a specific one, X is probably a subset of Y Further, if data is not available (min 13ish) then there is no Y In addition, the ''following recent flashy science'' thing is fair in general, but weird in specific here. Rocket science is not new, the engineering is new. Tony Stark Science is fiction, Team Seas science would be, i dont know, archimedes? conveyor belts are probably ancient. The Engineering is new. You cannot read a science paper and just apply it, it needs actual field work, and pushing back on field work will not help, it creates inaction, which is worse than picking the nth most optimal solution. It's worth mentioning, that the solutions at about min 15 could be pushed back on in this same way. Single use plastics will probably be replaced with something heavier, inducing more air polution for transport. Which is not to say that we shouldnt replace them, but that this is not a good lens to view the problem from. I think you are overestimating how big a campaign this is, because it exists in your space and is personal to you. 32m is a big number, but similarly does not move the needle for things like changing global infrastructure. It does clean up some trash though.
You put many of my counter-criticisms well here. And just to put the scale of this into perspective: The 80% reduction analysis by PEW estimated that $70B would be needed to pull their solutions off (plus major global industry and policy changes). TeamSeas have roughly raised 0.05% of that amount.
Exactly, this video was a huge waste of time, "X isn't perfect, we should be doing Y", but Y is this complete impossibility for anyone but some imaginary worldwide Dictator so we should just sit back and do nothing. I think most people understand that pollution as a whole is a loop and can really only be fixed over an enormous period of time. These groups are just working to make a surface level difference which is at least something.
You are WRONG. I greatly appreciate this video, it's been very educational. Have you seen some of "ocean clean ups" latest videos? They released a series of videos explaining similar problems to what you discussed. They touch on needing different solutions for each river, they also talk about changing the populations mindset so that they pollute LESS among other steps that need to be taken in order to solve the "plastic problem" as a WHOLE.
This hits the nail on the head. We have the technology, the expertise and apparently the public will and potentially means to make real headway on some of the real issues in the world. All we need now is for the ones with the money and fame to make it happen to actually direct their power to the most effective (if not the flashiest) place
this is SUCH a great way to phrase it! there's a report that came out by a group of experts on 2020 that concluded "we can cut annual flows of plastic into the ocean by about 80% in the next 20 years by applying existing solutions and technologies." which... !!.... let's goooo!!!!
though, of course, the ones with all the money and fame are only interested in generating more money and fame, and using the most flashy way possible is the most effective way to do that
The ones who get money and fame from the status quo will never be interested in changing it, that would jeopardise their money. The status quo can only be changed when those with money think that it must be changed in order to prevent it from collapsing (reform) or if those at the bottom change it by force (revolution).
"All we need is people with money to make it happen" is not a solution. It just restates the problem. All we need for world peace is to get the people with military power to make it happen. All we need to stop racism is for people who have the opportunity to treat everyone equally to do so. All we need to stop theft/murder/adultery/greed/etc is for everyone with free will to stop doing bad things.
Meanwhile there are other people with a lot more money (and less fame) who will spend whatever it takes to fight against even awareness of the issue, because there is money to be made in so-cheap-its-disposable packaging.
I feel like the complexity here is that we’re kind of comparing a greater solution that is defined with a lot of politics mixed in and a lesser solution which is defined as primarily an issue of raising money. Defining the problem as a complex problem requiring all kind of boots on the ground and unknown engagement with unknown entities makes ordinary viewers feel like the problem is unsolvable or that if there is a solution, not one that we have a part in. As a person who is not ready to change my career to become a plastic cleanup lobbyist, the question that I really want to know is where is the most effective place I can put donations? If Ocean Cleanup is not the best place to put dollars, where is that? Because I might not be willing to become a full time advocate now, but if you can step me into a quick actionable first step (like a 15 second donation click), that might step me into such advocacy later.
@@motherlove8366 Voting is a luxury of western democracies. It's a privilege. A lot of the places where ocean waste comes from don't have those luxuries.
@@heychrisfox Now to be fair, a lof of the plastic gets delivered from the western world, however its not like you can stop this by voting. Consider America, there are exactly 2 choices, both have the exact same effect. In other countries there are more choices, but your vote won't change shit their either.
Its an economic development issue. It will take decades for those countries to grow to the point where they do not have slums anymore and you will not get good garbage collection in slums.
The Ocean Conservancy, which is the other partner for the Team Seas campaign, has a proven track record of incredibly successful action- they blend worldwide, coordinated beach cleanups that gets lots of attention with research, policy development, and advising that tackles the longer-term stuff. 15 s to read, I hope- you can't go wrong with an Ocean Conservancy donation!
I think it's clear that a lot of science and evidence based charities and orgs are doing the right thing, but it's obvious the community does not know how to market or get people excited worth a lick. And i think that's what TeamSeas unlocked a bit. Instead of giving TeamSeas a hard time for receiving so many donations, i think it's absolutely worth to study what they did right and how to channel those things to orgs that you care about. Yes the interceptor has time spent on how it looks and how it's marketed instead of pure research time, but the design and marketing is a tool to get it in front of as many peoples' eyes as possible. Charities and orgs need to see that as a good thing, because a lot of people like me feel its better to get something off the ground than to always be imagining better solutions without putting forth an actual working solution.
The thing I admire about Ocean Cleanup is they have spent years researching the problem and developing and modifying their methods. They actually moved forward and implemented their ideas. Systematic change would of course be the best solution but in the meantime what are we supposed to do? 15 million for new waste management infrastructure is a joke.
you overestimate the research. quote from their own website; "At 16 years of age, Boyan Slat saw more plastic bags than fish when scuba diving in Greece. He thought: “Why can’t we just clean this up?” This question led him to research the plastic pollution problem for a school project. He learned about plastic accumulating in five large oceanic gyres, the largest one being the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. In 2012, Boyan Slat held a TedX talk about how to rid the world’s oceans of plastic using technology. The video went viral, and the momentum that followed allowed him to drop out of school and found The Ocean Cleanup. After many years of research, development, testing, and iteration, The Ocean Cleanup now has technologies to intercept plastic in rivers before it reaches the ocean, and technologies to remove the plastic that is already out there-debris that has been building up for decades." The tech is pretty much the same as in 2012. Unwittingly, they admit their problem a few lines further; "OCEAN SYSTEMS Plastic, once trapped in a gyre, will slowly break down, fragmenting into pieces called microplastics. Microplastic debris (< 5mm) is not only more challenging to clean up but is also easily mistaken for food by marine life."
What I see is some energetic people undertaking an experiment in improving the environment, which may or may not prove to be successful in the long term, but does not appear to have any downside. The amount of money involved is also, in the grand scheme of things, not huge. In tackling the problems of pollution and climate change, there will, and should, be multiple approaches, some of which will fall by the wayside, and others which will prove viable and be upscaled. I think for Dr. Clark and Dr. Shutte to say that only the best solution will do is to invite inertia in expectation of some Utopian formula which may never arrive.
@@Winnetou17 Yes, and that seems to be the problem that Drs. Clark and Schutte have with it. MrBeast and Mr. Roper use their massive reach to raise some money, and donate half of it to an organisation that they don't approve of. Little is made of the equal donation to Ocean Conservancy, of whom they apparently do approve , despite the controversies surrounding their approach to plastic clean-up. Given the budget differences between the two organisations, I'd call that a win for Ocean Conservancy. Dr. Clark also criticises The Ocean Cleanup for taking 'greenwashing' money from large corporations, when some of the same names appear on Ocean Conservancy's list of partners. He also insinuates that The Ocean Cleanup is more interested in perpetuating it's funding for the benefit of the participants than anything else. It's an accusation that non-profits sometimes get from their detractors, and is usually, but not always, not true. I see no evidence that it is true here.
@@juvenalsdad4175 The greenwashing is a pretty big problem. Many entities with a lot of money are actively seeking to greenwash in order to avoid public outrage and regulations. Giving them more options to greenwash is really not good. And if the majority of the money raised are from companies or entities that usually pollute and abuse like hell, then it's really no progress at all.
@@Winnetou17 I would agree that a lot of corporate donations to environmental organisations are made out of self-interest, but that is not a huge surprise. They regard the sums spent as a good investment for improving their ESG scores if their actual action on environmental matters is somewhat lacking. It does not explain, however, why Dr. Clark would highlight the 'greenwashing' associated with one organisation, and not the other.
The attitude presented in the video is the problem, that nothing should be done until a complete solution is implemented. The Interceptors (and Mr. Trash Wheel) are part of the solution, but demanding that poor countries that generate most ocean pollution switch to expensive alternatives to platic and implement massive waste management plans are unrealistic.
Yea asking 2 youtubers to alter the way plastic is produced, used and disposed of is totally reasonable. I'm sure that 30mil dollars is enough to convince every country on earth to ban plastic and fund the waste management system of every country. Thank you for the amazing video that totally doesn't feel like an attempt to make some quick and easy money off of a charity with great intentions.
"Perfect is the enemy of good" Without trying to justify anyone (because I don't know if they're good or not) what I can say is that scientists are good at science and NOT good at economics, politics, entrepreneurship, etc. They can tell you what the optimal solution is but that's usually "in theory" and not viable, practical approach; In this particular case they're saying "customize your solution for every scenario" and that's nonsense from a production standpoint, there's a reason factories and mass-production exists people, developing custom solutions COSTS MONEY (and money is just an abstraction of effort). So a less ideal solution you can deploy everywhere is BETTER than a custom solution that you'll only deploy once because you don't have enough resources to keep customizing (whether that "less ideal" solution is this company is a different matter). The same goes with the motto "remove plastic from the source" sure, if we don't had plastic we wouldn't have pollution but we can't take take plastic out of the equation without wrecking the economy so that's not an option. I would say it's easier to propose an ideal solution than a viable one but we don't fix the world by wishing it.
True I mean if these guys in the video had something better presumably they'd have given us some examples rather than vague generalities about "embracing the complexity"
@@thatundeadlegacy2985 the fact that you think those two options cost the same is the reason we can't solve this issue, you would absolutely destroy the economy if put in charge
As it is said: "filtering the plastic at the outlet of the rivers should be a last resort". To my knowledge we are already far past this point. "If there is the will and knowledge there are better solutions". I don't see any will in the last decades that has solved these issue to a acceptable level. It is not because something has been invented before that makes a copy is a scam if it serves the purpose. consumption It's like saying little Charlie spilled a glas of milk on the kitchen floor: The message in this video is: Should have not given a glas of milk to Charlie in the first place. There are some special bottles that don't spoil the content when dropped. And the person cleaning the mess up is a scam because they use a kitchen mop wich is not new technology. In the end the mess has to be cleaned up. Now you can discuss about thousand ways to do it properly, but you have to start somewhere and the approach taken since thousands of years is to clean it up! Kudos for starting the cleanup and not just talking about it!
I think a big part of why Ocean Cleanup chooses its methods is marketing. Removing a pound of plastic from the oceans for every dollar received sounds infinitely times better than contributing to all the other more vague solutions, even when they're way more useful. I'm confident that TeamSeas chose them mainly out of misinformation, but utilizing this way of promoting the charity must've been a huge plus too.
The argument cuts both ways. The reason that it's so difficult to hold academics accountable for their failures to fix anything is because the abstraction they use in describing their solutions is so unquantifiable and, as you say, vague, that you can never pin them down. At least with a stupid slogan like "one pound per dollar" you can get a scale, measure the plastic, and know that they've failed.
@@neildutoit5177 Those slogans are often so simple that no one checks them and they most of time turn out false. Not saying that is the case here. Acedemia usualy qualifies their statements so they are as accurate as possible. It doesn't matter if it is usefully right or not, as long as you follow the procedure we will eventualy get there.
How many other charities do you know about off the top of your head dedicated to removing plastic from the environment? Marketing is important, and the argument that there are more useful solutions is ancillary to the fact that they are working to remove plastic from the environment. Those more useful solutions are generally economically and bureaucratically prohibitive.
god damn, if someone would pay me a dollar for every pound of trash I picked up out of rivers my city would be fucking gleaming hell with all the money they raised they would have been better off just going to a bunch of universitys around the country and paying broke ass students a dollar for every bit of crap they could pull off the beach or rivers
@@randomcow505 I recently heard a quote that goes something like, "It takes one person to clean up two pieces of litter to clean an entire neighborhood." There is a lotter of waste out there, but SOMEBODY - literally anybody - doing the work nobody wants to do makes a way bigger difference than academics are willing to admit.
I donated 30 dollars to Teamseas back in 2021. I wasn't aware of the fact that 30 million pounds of trash is an extremely small portion of the entire ocean trash. I wish I knew this information earlier. Should've just spent my 30 dollars for a book or something.
I am going to have to go through their videos again, because I am pretty sure some of your criticisms have already been covered by the Ocean Cleanup group. First off is the idea that the interceptors are being offered as a one size fits all solution. Maybe when they started they might have thought that, but recent videos have really pushed the fact that they are increasingly realising that every river is different and needs different solutions. Second is they often talk about working with local communities to educate and look for solutions to the problems being faced that cause the pollution. The interceptors are put in place and are run and maintained by locals. I am not aware of the specifics, which is why my response to the criticisms is not a fanboy rant, but I feel they are at least talking about these issues. Third, with regard to the science, as far as I can see this is at the heart of what they are doing. Their research into where the pollution is coming from, finding the rivers that are doing the most damage, using machine learning to monitor and build models of pollution and even realising there is a huge problem with where all the plastic is going if so little is visibly making it into the ocean is all underpinned by science. I suppose the response to this video is up to them, but if I was them my response would be that the mission was to raise awareness and do something about the ocean garbage patches. They started with the bigger ocean cleanup mission and then realised that this was fundamentally flawed because how can you clean the ocean if you don’t stop the flow of plastic into the ocean in the first place? This is where the idea of the interceptor came from. When it comes to sorting out refuse collection and stopping plastic use in the first place, somebody else needs to start doing something about that. The scale of the problem means it will take multiple stakeholders to fix it. The critique wasn’t what I was expecting, and the fact it was backed up by science gives it a sense of validity, but it also doesn’t mean my support for the ocean clean up is going to end.
This video is what we like to call a strawman. Neither of the two organizations this guy criticizes claims that their campaigns and/or technology will clean up all the plastic in rivers and oceans.
TeamSeas does work. It removes literal tons of garbage and plastic from our oceans. It doesn't solve all problems but criticizing partial solutions doesn't seem like a good way to try to save the environment. This same concept is going to be super important for combating climate change. We are not going to find the perfect solution right away, but we should cheer on any incremental step towards this goal.
I see these efforts as one part of the solution, keep up with team seas and skimming rivers for trash, build further infrastructure to keep trash out of the water in the first place. Each idea we have to contribute to this problem is like another paragraph in the essay we need to write.
Gosh! Never seen so much shade thrown at Ocean Cleanup. Sad. They're doing a fine job. Easier to be an armchair critic, than to go out and actually DO something. Right?
Well… i don’t agree that the interceptors is a bad idea given that it the will take a lot of time to get proper infrastructure in place to actually recycle plastic locally. We both need this kind of new technology AND better systems for managing the waste locally.
In Lithuania there's nets at the end of the sewage system that goes into the rivers, and I think once a week they collect all the trash that is trapped in it and take it somewhere else. It is not a perfect system, but it does stop the biggest things from entering our rivers in the first place
The summary of this video. If you can't fix the problem, don't do anything at all. We all know the solution to plastic in the river is making sure plastic doesn't go into that river. The issue is getting a local government to do anything about it is impossible. So next best thing to try to minimize damage. Which is what Ocean Cleanup is and is pretty clear of this.
"So that means the corporations that produce the plastic..." yeah unfortunately that is going to be a very difficult fight. Huge corporations seem to be fervently opposed to spending a single cent on environmentalism unless they can spin it as a PR stunt (but only if it doesn't actually have a substantial effect on the status quo)
this is so true and yet doesnt have to be, for instance coca-cola already sells glass bottles in a lot of countries for the same price, and fewer countries for limited editions for the same price, so cost isnt the opposition in this case its just easier to manufacture the quantity in plastic.
summary of the video: youtuber A with the help of random scientists bashes youtubers B and C who try to help cleaning up plastics. First team clearly spends more time doing powerpoints than picking up anything but the logic is: "if you cant do it perfectly then just sit on your hands". Great content.
"It's defining and quantifying your problem, if you don't know what the problem is, it will be extremely difficult to tackle it and demonstrate that you have solved the problem." This is also some of the best relationship advice I've heard in a while too XD
The problem with the "other solutions" is corruption. Sure we'll try to empower the communities, but those who are in charge would usually squander the money or put it to their pockets and do as little as possible anyway.
Because there is no corruption in non profits, the one in this video is literally getting money from Coca Cola to greenwash, there will always be corruption. The possibility of corruption shouldn't stop trying to achieve a solution, it just requires taking it into account and trying to prevent it.
The focus on picking up plastic discounts companies who produce plastic. In itself, cleanup is needed but it's also needed for particles smalles than a 1mm.
Exactly. And coca-cola will slap a "each bottle sold contributes to cleaner oceans" sticker on their bottles, and give the ocean cleanup a donation of $10,000, while pumping out more plastic.
I agree with the overall sentiment, but we need to look at what we can do as individuals. I regularly pick up trash in my neighborhood. It's a lost cause, but after each cleaning the area looks nice, so that's the payoff. I focus on high traffic areas and specific sites and don't worry about the overall picture. Of course, there has to be some infrastructure in place for any cleaning campaign to be a success.
So the proposed alternative solutions in this video, with the exception of the river clean up, are political and social in nature, which is to say they could be implemented tomorrow but probably will take decades and are completly outside of the control of you, me and TeamSeas. It's like telling me I shouldn't pick up trash from the forest because the problem is way bigger than just a little trash on the surface while also telling me my solution is ineffiecent. Which is both true but instead of offering a viable alternative of what I could do instead you tell me the government should fix the problem, which is true in the long run but also nothing that I can really influence alone, making your argument worthless to me.
That's not the only thing he said. He also explained that Team Seas wasn't using/placing their technology correctly and that they aren't being honest about how revelotunary, effective and omniaplicable their solutions are. The solutions he proposed are most affective when implemented institutionaly but doing things like river specific solutions and building messures that prevent plastic geting into the rivers are still relatively effective on a NGO/Charatiy and even personal level. Team Seas could build tech, to prevent Trash getting into water streams or proper garbage dumps in poor communities that currently have ones that leak into the rivers. But that's less sexy than the less effective futuristic alternative. Edit: for Grammar
@@LOgomon20 What tech could they build? If you look at the Mark Rober video that was being critiqued (which features the interceptor), he literally goes to the source of the river waste. He talked to leaders on the ground, and they say that because of the way their governments work, they don't have effective options for cleaning their trash. So the average person, not knowing what to do with their waste, throws away, and it ends up in the river. How could TeamSeas solve THAT issue in any meaningful, reasonable way?
Oh no- I don't want that to be the message you took from this video! here's why I was excited to contribute to this video (an alternative message in 2 sentences): Team Seas is a really big campaign that unfortunately seems to have backed a solution that isn't the best, which is a bummer. I'll be spending my resources on other solutions, including beach cleanups and long-term changes, both of which are The Ocean Conservancy's jam, so I can also donate directly to them instead of Team Seas. Individual action absolutely matters, not least of all so we can have sustained hope that the long-term solutions are worth pushing for. ❤️
In a video like this, going into detail of some examples of the highly functional methods would be super important in order to get credibility here It feels like you might have intentionally brushed past this because it might have been hard or not as great of a solution as you say
Right. Feels like there are so many bad-faith arguments in here. A cynic would think they might feel upset that their decades of talking about the problem had little actual effects while some simple idea (i.e. not high tech at all, nor pretending to be) by a high-school kid (Boyan thought up the ocean cleanup as his final high school project) is actually getting something done. I might be wrong, but this video gives us absolutely nothing on how effective any other method has actually turned out to be.
You keep saying it's best to stop plastic at the source. But I ask you, is it best to try to catch each individual raindrop, or just put a barrel below rain gutter? It's far more efficient to collect plaatic where it is already concentrated. Sure, building out a great sanitation network is a great goal, but it's one that's vastly out of reach for third world countries. But what's not out of reach is collecting the plastic that's already concentrated by the rivers.
I enjoyed this video and I generally think your content on environmental science, but I wish you had gone a bit more in depth on specific technologies or soloutions that can or have been implemented in specific scenarios. A lot of the talk surrounding better soloutions was pretty vague, so I feel like I still don't have a good idea of what those solutions are.
which makes the existence of this entire video puzzling to me. If you want to make a video about how cleanup isn't the final solution then fine, but why criticize someone for trying to clean up at all? He didn't even offer an alternative to their method.
I just have to say, at least they're doing something. I don't really like the tone of this video. You know a charity is pretty hamstrung in what they can actually do. It's not like they can go out and tell huge companies what they can do or change people's lifelong habits. Unless we find out they're stealing donations or something like that, I'm all for it.
16:50 You really hit the nail on the head. The general public clearly cares a lot about causes like this, which is why publicity campaigns and greenwashing exist. But the best solution is rarely the most attractive one, and the most attractive solution is always the one that will resonate with people the most. I have a lot of respect for both Mr Beast and Mark Rober, but it's kind of ironic that a campaign fronted by an ex-NASA engineer falls so short on its efficacy due to poor scientific understanding.
I've met both of them and my initial reaction when I heard about Team Seas was something like "they must not know! they both want to do good- they don't fully understand who they've partnered with!" and then uh... well, it was made clear that I was being naive- their campaign staff sure did make different decisions than I would have. so I'm not sure "poor scientific understanding" is how I would phrase what happened here 🫣
@@tams805 no, I don't mean that. To be clear: I never spoke to Mark in any way about this campaign (I met him over lunch years ago at a conference) and Jimmy was super kind in the 1 text message exchange that we had about Team Seas. I talked almost exclusively with campaign staff, thinking they didn't have all the info that science-oriented folks did. And it turns out they totally did, they just decided on a different course of action than I would have if I were rich and famous with that same info.
@@vgwschutteIt's a shame if they had that knowledge. Unlike other charities or groups that have to market the cause to get attention, simply Mr Beast's face attached to the project is enough to get people's attention. I don't understand the need to harm the whole campaign for extra marketing.
to be fair though, he is an engineer, mostly a mechanical engineer. Scientific method there is vastly different than ones in a more "murky" sciences like geology or humanity. He sure can make mechanical assembly and test the heck out of it. but the same thinking process doesn't translate to drafting an environmental movement policy, what he should do is obviously (as the video said) consult to a few experts, but i do emphasise if it doesn't cross hiss mind, or even if he does, i do understand (but not agree with ) that good publicity is better than no publicity
I don't know. Watched both of your videos. Both of you make a good point but I truly don't think Mark Rober's efforts are futile. The system is messed up. Anyone who does anything to help, even the slightest bit, is on the right track. If everyone out there could simply stop littering (individuals and factories/companies), that is the #1 solution. But, we know how that goes.
Exactly. We could do something or nothing. Sure, we could solve the entire problem, but good luck with that. Changing how an entire planet throws away their garbage or how an entire planet uses plastic is not a reasonable solution, because the problem is way too big to even conceive. Keeping trash from entering the ocean IS sustainable, easy, efficient, and practical; it's just not the best possible solution, because the best possible solution isn't attainable by a tiny charity organization.
This was great - don't pull punches too hard though! This style of influence carries over into everything and its maddening. Recently got a comment that I need to go get with it and start being properly green-minded by getting an EV when I only drive my 20 year old tiny car I keep fixing up about 15 miles per month (if even that) because I bike literally everywhere. Meanwhile they're on their 3rd car in 7 years - because more EV's is more green, right?! /s
this is the entire reason why I'm on TikTok- trying to keep the focus on long-term solutions is hard and requires support!! not guilt or detailed transgression counting ❤️
@@alalalala57 These weren't second-hand cars, and even if they were they'd still be contributing a ton more emissions than my biking and extremely rare car trip.
The fact that the interceptor is doing anything is more than most are doing. Overly critical video, no this is not an end all be all solution and I absolutely respect that position. We are not at the point in our progress to make misleading thumb nails and titles to shoot down a relatively small clean up project in comparison to the positivity it does have
As an IT-specialist I love new technology as much as anyone, but a lot of people on the internet are so impressed by fancy new technology, that they forget to ask whether that's actually needed to solve the problem or even if the alleged problem even needed a solution at all. IoT stuff is the best example, where a lot of products require microchips and online connectivity for something that could've been achieved by purely analogue electric or even mechanical systems. Home appliances are another one: Why does a whole range of toasters with microprocessors, LC-Displays and various toasting programs exist, when a simple model that appart from the case just consist of a spring, an electromagnet, some high resistance wire and a potentiometer achieves the same darn thing? I get that it's fun to marvel at the ingenuity of making a highly complex technical system work smoothly, but that shouldn't make one forget that the simpler you can make the solution to a problem, the better, cheaper and more reliable it usually will be!
We need to start pushing companies to be financially responsible for the waste they generate and for all negative externalities in general. Recycling fees, taxes on production, make them pay for cleanup, etc.
@@LifeOnHoth the companies will pay for it, increasing prices correspondingly. This will drive them to improve their processes to be more environmentally friendly to remain competitive while also nudging customers towards more sustainable products and services. Win-win all around
I have question, I agree that looking at the issue in retrospect you can clearly spend this money better based on the evidence presented in this video. However I feel you may underrate the importance of marketing in this process. While the actual, in practice best solutions may not be so flamboyant they are simply worse from a marketing perspective and would have very likely generated less total money to work with against the problem. It may be depressing to see that we do need to market the research, but at the end of the day we need to make sure its practical, and marketing is a critical part in rallying the public behind respective solutions.
@@simonfinnie2900 That "spectacle" is essentially marketing though. Regardless of Mr Beasts involvement that feeling of spectacle is very successful marketing.
@@simonfinnie2900 Yeah, maybe there would have been a better way to do it and still have just as much of a spectacle I agree. I wonder if there are any particular reasons why not, or if such a thing was even considered. It would be interesting if there is ever a response but I don't know if that will happen.
@@morton_hacks This is possibly the greatest hope I have for the Ocean Cleanup project, that they eventually get enough money and cultural capital that they can start to influence the companies and governments that have the power to fix the problem at the source. Of course, that also relies on them also deciding to wield that influence, because when they do it will dry up their funding source. There is a lot of money in superficially pretending to solve a problem while never actually solving it.
@@Ladadadada 100%, also superficially fixing a problem is a big issue, such as the current issue with gas replacing coal a slight but little difference in emissions. And then fossil fuel power plants are marketed as falling with data sources failing to include gas. I do not think that this is what Mr Beast and Mark Rober are doing though. I would like to take the benefit of doubt here and suggest that it may have simply been the best way to make the most money and some of these other options were considered in the process.
It's pretty easy to criticize TeamSeas as a surface level solution, but I'd argue that the action and visual awareness of TeamSeas does more for environmental change than critique
That's pretty speculative. TeamSeas marketing could lead to complacency if they oversell the idea that this will be solved by technology so no one needs to change their own consumption/recycling habits. This kind of critique gives you a better understanding of where you should focus your efforts if you care about fixing the problem instead of selling the dream that you don't have to do anything and things will be fixed by an NPO with futuristic looking boats.
Couldn't agree more. Letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. Whilst I'm glad these videos exist to bring about a bit of realism to the hype, Team Seas shone a light on an issue and got people excited about Ocean Cleanup in a way they just couldn't if donations solely went to Ocean Conservancy. So it was probably a good mix to split donations between both charities.
Or it could become like recycling that allows people that aren't following too closely to think that the issue is being addressed. The only solution is to tax the companies that are producing and using the plastics to cover at least some portion of the cost of cleanup and prevention.
Let me recap this whole video: 1. Ocean cleanup doesnt work as well as you think (totally fair) 2. There are other solutions 3. Doesnt state any realistic alternative solutions 4. Look how smart i am for making you listen to me for 20 minutes without saying anything of real substance. 5.I can seem greater than all these organizations that are at least making an effort to positively impact the world by pointing out their flaws, meanwhile, ill just say "systematic change" is the solution to the problem. "Systematic change" is technically the solution to most problems that exist, but until Coca Cola stops profiting off plastic bottles (never) and 3rd world governments have the finances and luxury to focus on issues such as waste management infrastructure, we as a society will be reduced to identifying solutions we can actually control. So kudos to Ocean Cleanup for at least making an attempt.
Systematic change also comes from projects like this, that gathers the whole world to clean up plastics. When everyone is aware of the damages plastic causes the environment, politics are pushed to please their voters, and systematic change is encouraged to happen. Some scientists really struggle to get their head out of their ass. And are upset that people are willing to go and clean up trash, instead of giving them money.
wait up, i think what really needs to be said, is that ocean clean up are at least actually doing something. In my eyes taking trash out of the water is only a good thing. To criticise saying, oh this is futile etc seems silly as let's face it they still doing an amazing thing for the world. It could maybe do it better, sure! but also doing SOMETHING hopefully will inspire more to join and think of better more affective solutions!
All the criticism I see of Ocean Cleanup is like this, where it criticizes the efficiency and says it's not enough. But they are at least doing something, compared to all their critics that just want to keep arguing for an eternity while the oceans die.
One thing I like about the ocean cleanup is that they made headlines (just like most of the other organisations) but just like you said, they look cool. A bunch of young people see this and they start reading about it. This is where they start thinking about their own inventions and solutions, because they also want to 'make a difference' and build cool things that help the planet. So I think it's about the "image" it creates. If they can invent something cool, that helps the planet, then I can too.
When the title said "didn't work" I was kinda expecting this thing catches NOTHING!!! Turns out can't just depend on "one neat trick"? Okay fine develop more solutions. I'm fine with having multiple solutions covering each other's weak points.
Not surprised by the amount of people in the comments who either didn't watch the video or didn't pay attention. As you've said, the problem is not the TeamSeas initative it's that they have so much potential and are squandering it while taking so much attention away from the places that actually need support and could be having more impact. Great video as always, keep it up!
An attractive thing about the interceptor as a concept I think is that it seems possible. Yes, it's "easy" but I think it's more than just people being lazy. When the problem is systematic and worldwide it feels so hopeless. Picking up trash and recycling is good but it still end up in nature, and trying to fix systematic things in one country is hard enough but when it's multiple countries and companies all over the world it feels impossible. Even if I, as an individual, do the stuff (recycle, use less plastic, protest, vote, ect), all those things, even if that's what's needed, FEELS like a blip at most. People have already been recycling/voting/ect and trying to fix things for a long time and stuff's still bad. But "buying a boat" (at least controbuting to one) FEELS like it's something doable that actually makes a difference, even if it doesn't..
this video right here is why comprehensive enviromental action will never get done. As soon as someone start trying to implement as solution people rip into it for not being big enough or not accounting for this or that. The truth is that to save the enviroment and the climat thousands if not hundreds of thousands of solutions will have to be implemented, and with that many things needing to happen it is really easy to argue over what is most important or what is best, but at the end of the day they all must be done and at the end of the day you must just start doing and let the momentum carry us towards the goal. This video comes across as someone who is upset that people are going with a solution that isnt theirs and decides to complain about it instead of congratualating and getting on with what needs to be done.
9:20 No. The trashwheels, there are two, are near the end of their respective streams, but they are instream systems. The trashwheels work because their booms collect the floating debris of a single stream that goes in one direction. They aren't in the harbor where currents sweep things together like the pacific garbage patch. It is very much like the interceptor, and has been quite effective at reducing trash in the harbor. Would Dr. Schutte be less critical of the interceptor if they placed it right before the delta, which effectively is what the trashwheels are doing? I think not.
YES I would be less critical of the interceptor if they used science/evidence to inform their decisions (like where the interceptor should go, and Mr Trash Wheel has a great, publicly available reporting system!), but The Ocean Cleanup has a history of doing science in-house that they don't show to people outside the org, and then attacking scientists who use evidence available to all to critique their systems. So a huge part of WHY I'm critical is BECAUSE The Ocean Cleanup's past behavior indicates that they are not willing to engage with scientific evidence on what works, but they are willing to destroy wildlife/habitat in order to scoop trash.
I agree with you in the sentences that cleaning up the rivers isn't the best solution and we should stop the plastic to enter the water in the first place But I don't agree with you in the point of green washing companies just because a big company is bad for the environment if they use their money to finance a project for the future it is still good And the point at 11:30 just because there are now better solution doesn't need new inventions because if there is no "competition" nothing will change Because with newer tech we might clean the ocean by 2035 and not 5 years later
the point is this tech WONT clean up the ocean. It's might make it all look better but it's like sweeping your toys under the bed the rooms still a mess you just made it look nicer. There's still the trash under the surface and still trash all over the banks and in the sediment. All the plastic is breaking down and making it's way into the environment is sizes to small for an interceptor to do anything about.
I see one group actually doing something to help solve the problem, another person "trash-talking" it and saying the solution is "science", unfortunately, this is more common than not
what team seas is doing is throwing one drop of water on a fire at a time...sure they're doing *something*, but as scientists are saying, useless and missing the point what we should do is reduce the amount of plastic waste in the first place, with good waste management, reduced plastic usage overall and better regulation for protecting our rivers and oceans. there are an estimated 300 billion pounds of plastic in the ocean, removing 30 million pounds is laughably miniscule.
@@Avx829 The point is that the interceptor can't clean up the oceans by itself, having a thousand or a million won't change that fact: it only helps against a very specific problem of plastic swimming on the surface of a river. An interceptor on every river still won't fish out all the plastic. You're underestimating what has been done so far, climate regulation has not only been passed as laws, but also does work. The most famous case was worldwide regulation saving the ozone layer. As regarding legislation specific to plastic in the ocean: many countries do quite successfully keep their rivers clean, and some regions also are starting to try reducing plastic usage. Don't give in to climate doomerism, there is hope! We still have a long way to go, but it's only impossible to solve it if we stop trying.
@@Avx829 I'm not saying their completely useless, but on the scale we're talking here such a technical solution doesnt work in relevant numbers. Plastic pollution is a deeply complex systemic issue, machines like these simply can't sustainably scale to meet the requirements. It's similar to current attempts at carbon capture: it works well on small scale for certain systems, but it's not sustainable to deploy to solve climate change as a whole. That's why people take issue with this project being used as the flagship for team seas: it's not that the project itself is bad, but in that it's such small legobrick in the "grand solution" to ocean pollution. It's misleading for the general public as to what our primary focus ought to be: which should be environmentally friendly politics.
@@Avx829 I think you misunderstood my point about scaleability; a thousand intereceptors are not a thousand times as effective, the systems we are dealing with are much more complex than that. As discussed in this video, plastic does not just float down on the surface of a river, there are a myriad of ways it lands in the ocean, and there are a myriad of places besides oceans where it is a danger to the environment. Filtering out microplastic is an incredibly difficult task that will depend heavily on the environment. Nets in the ocean have their own issues, they can only be effectively used in certain situations, wrongly applied they can seriously harm the wildlife. This is not a videogame where you can build some machine that magically filters out 10% of all plastic per squaremeter of water covered. In reality every environment is different, there are different types of plastic, different ways they are harmful, different ecosystems one has to be careful not to destroy by cleaning out plastic. I'm not saying the cleanup is useless, it does filter out plastic, which is great. But it's not a solution that will solve the problem, it's one small step among a million others that have to be taken. It's understandable why these interceptors seem so attractive to many people: it's a simple understandable solution that on the surface seems to work great, it's just the reality is as always much more complicated. Also: climate regulation absolutely is a form of action: reducing the overall plastic produced certainly will have an effect, and it's one that with relatively little resources used strikes at the heart of the problem. When your boat has a leak, the most important step is to plug the hole, else you'll be pumping out water for a long time.
So what you seem to be saying is that it's better to carry on doing what we've been doing for the past few decades in the hope that it might work one day. The Ocean Cleanup Project is attacking the problem from the POV of what we can do as individuals who don't have access to politicians who can force cures at source. They've never claimed that their technology is new or particularly sexy - it's the very ordinariness of it that makes it so useful. They've also stressed that each river needs its own solution, but you drone on about how they're a one-solution-fits-all outfit.
I think the most important detail (which isn't mentioned until 14:50) is simply "stop the production of single-use plastics. That's everything from plastic grocery bags, disposable cutlery, and packaging, to drink bottles/packets (sorry capri-sun), to things like ketchup and barbeque individual use packets. Unfortunately, plastic simply does not get recycled, pretty much anywhere, what was "being recycled" was really being dumped in China and the Philippines until they stopped accepting it (and were likely burning it, not recycling it.) So that leads me to believe we have to make some hard choices: 1) literately regulate plastic, either by requiring a refundable deposit, or imposing a levy on all plastic products. If it's too expensive to recycle, then it should not be made. Period. Go back to glass or metal bottles, at least those can both be reused and recycled. Unlike plastic (which photo-degrades, unlike metal, and leeches plasticizers into the food, unlike glass) 2) lean on other unsustainable services (eg uber-eats) to produce coolers and cutlery/dishes for their drivers, that the food, drinks and condiments can be delivered in, and then taken back to be cleaned. Then in turn lean on the restaurants to adopt these as their standard food packaging so they can be first reused, and later recycled if damaged. There is no reason McDonalds, Burger King and Wendys can not use the same "burger-saver" cooler. Right now, the amount of over-packaging from food couriers is absolutely ridiculous and is increasing the amount of garbage and plastic waste, rather than reducing it by getting less people to drive long distances for a meal. There is so much over-packaging in food, that it would not surprise me to discover that a lot of plastic trash in rivers is directly from beverage containers and "prepackaged" foods.
This channel: "TheOceanCleanup doesnt customize their solutions" Also this channel: * Only offers solutions right at the source * (plastic already in the ocean can rot there)
No, trying to clean up plastic in the ocean without stopping it at the source is like the little dutch boy sticking his finger into the dike. You have to target plastics at their source, otherwise, you are just wasting money picking up plastics that will be back in the ocean by tomorrow.
As I see the problem is really about getting people attention to the problem, and for this Ocean Cleanup is indeed a great solution. It does a poor job of actually cleanup, but as you said yourself, it makes into the headlines. So if half of the TeamSeas donations goes to the Ocean Conservancy, I believe that the Ocean Cleanup is worth it if brings double the donations it would without it. So I don't think blaming TeamSeas here is really fair, and splitting the donations indicates that they knew about the Ocean Cleanup effectiveness, but thought it was the best compromise to grab attention. Maybe the clickbaity title "Why TeamSeas Doesn't Work" is a bit harsh. Sure, is a nice way to bring and point people to the right solutions, but it ain't actively bringing more contributions (monetary) that converts to solving the problem itself.
"Cleaning others mess isn't good enough, you can just try to convince others not to make a mess in the first place, even if it wont lead anywhere" Oh sweet summer child...
Great video. The problem is that even though we have a very high degree of plastic seperation in our waste stream in Denmark we export up to 85% of the plastic. It is unknown where the plastic ends up. I have seen videos indicating it is exported to e.g. Germany which exports it to some east Asian country where it often times is dumped in landfills or directly in rivers.
To those commenting that the Ocean Cleanup does somewhat customise their solution to different rivers and are in fact making a (small) difference to plastic pollution (and not claiming to be _the_ solution): you're missing the point. At no point do I say the interceptors don't clean up floating plastic. They do what they're designed to do. The point of this video is that _better_ solutions are known, and further will actually accomplish the TeamSeas goal of significantly reducing ocean plastic pollution (with the nice benefit of also cleaning up rivers).
As Dr Schutte says: why settle for less than the best solution?
Perfect is the enemy of good !!!
@@Jandieckmeyer Yes, but this is more distinctly average than good.
In your video you are claiming that what the OCean Clean UP project is doing wrong precisely because - as you claim in your video- they have a one-stop solution- which they as you claim here do not have. again, you make the argument as if ocean clean up is claiming to be the best solution, while in fact they are not. Secondly, if there are better solutions , you could have spend your 20-minute video on highlighting those solutions- and paint a more realistic picture regarding those solutions - as waste mangement and recycling is not something that is easy to do on a global scale (and def. cannot be done for the amount of investment of the Team Seas project), and you have not provided much alternative methods to clean up plastics on river beds/flood plains either.
@@Geth270 (1) It basically comes down to lobbying for laws and regulations that prevent companies from throwing garbage into the environment in the first place, and (2) there is no silver bullet for removing the existing plastic from the environment. Every ecosystem will require its own solution. I am sure that you can probably reuse components from system to system, but essentially you have to create a custom solution for every ecosystem. (3) Dr. Schutte mentions a report by the PEW organisation (reference 11) which lists various solutions that together can reduce the amount of plastic that flows into the ocean significantly.
All of these points were mentioned in the video.
@@Geth270 11:50
This video is great, because the problems with the interceptor are even inherent in one of their videos, the one you were using clips of in this video where he plays basketball with the locals.. They go talk to the locals about why they dump stuff in the river. Turns out they don't have bins or any form of waste management, and basically dump stuff on the floor which then flows into the river when it rains. And then they proceed to do nothing about it, and go back to the interceptor.
Local governments need to create and maintain effective wage management systems. This charity is merely reducing the impact of these systematic failures until solutions are finally implemented.
@@qascarface To follow up your thoughts here, I can't see any way to 'force' these societies to change their ways short of the ol' United States Diplomacy (tm) method of destroying and overwriting entire systems of government through war. Even sending multiple times their GDP as 'aid' dedicated toward public awareness and waste management programs won't solve the problem.
It's well-known that picking up trash is only as helpful as a band-aid, while adjusting human mindsets and governmental processes is the real solution - it's just that a non-profit can't make these changes, even with unlimited budget.
@@qascarface they could try to lobby for it or at least bring it to attention so that other people are aware and can maybe do it.
Yeah but there’s not all that much these guys can do about that, save getting into local politics. They’re doing what they can within their sphere of control.
@@leighbee13 that's my biggest issue with this video. Yes you should tackle the problem at the source, but for one thing they dont need to be exclusive you can do both things, and also the "source" isnt attainable by teamseas. They don't have power over the politicians and local governments who should invest in these waste management systems.
I'm all for science and innovation, but if a "low tech" solution is cheaper and more efficient (as well as proven) then I'd rather prefer using that instead of flashy new things.
The worst offenders are those who try to reinvent trains and just end up with shittier, but more sparkly trains.
The other organization team seas gives to is the ocean cleanup which is a net 2 miles long pulled by a boat extremely effective at what it does
@@-p2349 Bro what, this video is about the ocean cleanup and it isnt effective, thats the point of the video. The video supports the ocean conservency which doesnt use the stupid boats
@@-p2349 how effective is it?
Elon musk and hyperloop lmao
@@darkithnamgedrf9495 I mixed up the names
Like many others said, ocean cleanup isn't the solution, but it's definitely helps! The worst thing we can do, is do nothing while we argue about some perfect solution that will never be perfect.
Seven Clean seas is the hollistic solution though
Could not have said it better.
It's great to stop the source, that is a huge task that hasn't been achieved with recycling campaigns. it must. The problem with your video is that your calling it a black and white issue, that people won't invest or contribute to the source. These can be worked together, you can inspire local governments to employ better recycling. $30 million won't make a dent in local water management for example all over the world. Where do you prioritise? Plastic waste is already out there so any plan to stop it at the source also needs to clean up what is there now. Ocean clean up isn't sexy as you say it's just getting a job done, and with scientific research. It's interesting to see this perspective, other solutions are available. But it comes off as bashing a workable practise such as "but they're not getting all plastic 😓" from the bottom of rivers. They're will need to be another solution for that too. PADI, www.padi.com/conservation/torchbearer attempt to clean the seas, because the issue is there now.
how does it help? they cleaned one beach. Unarguably it was counter productive and destructive in the bigger picture.
@@yeetyeet7070 @mrbeast cleaned the beach that day as a demonstration of what it takes to clean a beach. The project is much larger, have a look at the good work at ocean cleanup.
Why would it be counter productive? For the Beach example, I can assume the rubbish returned which would be a constant battle when not fixed at the source by at least it has less rubbish.
This isn’t related to the topic, but thank you so much for having such good subtitles. The colour coding for different speakers is especially helpful. I’m personally not hard of hearing, I just watch videos in loud environments sometimes, but I have friends who are, so having great and amazingly accessible videos to recommend them is always amazing. Thank you.
I spotted a few mistakes in the subtitles though, they are mostly okay but sometimes they get some words or phrases wrong and end up being a bit confusing.
@@danims7329 Oh, they aren’t perfect, a few spots threw me for a loop for a second like you say. But the vast majority of UA-camrs, even ones with otherwise very high production quality, just don’t bother with subtitles, leaving us with UA-cam’s autogenerated captions which are… sub-par, to say the least. The fact that Simon thought of it, and opted for colour coded subtitles on top of that, puts him far ahead of most channels in this regard.
This
Yeah - reminds me of Tom Scott's subtitles, with the colour-coding (defaulting to white for speaker 1, yellow for speaker 2) and everything. My guess is that they use the same company (Caption+) to caption their video.
"-oH lOoK aT mE i bOuGhT A lAmBoRgiNi
-BUY SOME DAMN SUBTITLES"
Brutally honest and informative. A key feature I keep seeing is there is a lot of focus is on "solutions" that look cool, rather than being honest with ourselves and focus on what actually works.
Absolutely. I may have slightly pulled my punches in the video, but I think my biggest problem with the interceptors is their emphasis on looking good in promo material rather than their efficacy. It's so damaging to actually fixing this problem.
@@SimonClark Like you said in the video: the upstream process is so much more important to attack: using less plastic/don't dump plastic in the river to begin with!
@@SimonClark did you look into the channel for the ocean cleanup?
If you think you can do better how about you do it instead of talking about it. You have all this ideas and why not put it into work?
The reason is: Using new technology to clean up is the easy solution that doesn't require us to change our habit. It suggest that we can go on like this because we can remove the harmful stuff afterwards. However: It's exactly what is written here: a cleanup and those are always imperfect. No cleanup in the world will get everything.
The more efficient, cost effective and long term solution would be: Not producing easily discardable plastics in the first place -- nay! Not producing easily discardable stuff in general. For example the ban on one time use drinking straws has spurred a massive industry in almost as bad replacements, from paper, to bamboo.
When Ocean Cleanup was only working on cleaning up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, they were criticized for ignoring river pollution. OC responded by aggressively pursuing their river Interceptor initiative - now criticized here, in turn. It's true the Interceptors don't address the greatest causes of pollution: 1) use of plastics in short-lived consumer and industrial goods, and 2) failure of nations - many poor and corrupt - to invest adequately in waste management facilities. Unfortunately, these largest causes of pollution are driven by considerations far beyond the reach of an organization like the OC.
Removing that garbage patch made sense, something like this is the only way that's ever going to happen. The rivers are best handled by reducing the amount of plastic created, increasing the portion of the plastic that is created that gets properly recycled, and making it as easy as possible for regular people to ensure that their plastics are being properly disposed of.
Here is an interceptor in use in California. ua-cam.com/video/BpYvhMinQoU/v-deo.html&ab_channel=TheOceanCleanup
That's true, but one of the points of this video was that this initiative drains public attention and finances out from more effective solutions. It is not bad what they are doing, but they could combine their efforts with others teams to prevent pollution of the rivers rather than cleaning them this way. Bad things they are popularizing least effective method. It is also not far beyond the reach of an organization like OC who has massive influencers supporting them, don't underestimate internet communities, they can do a lot if really motivated =)
@@crazytushkan4022 THat isn't even true. Most of the young people who follow Mr Beast and Mark Rober will probably never give another penny or thought into that issue because now it will go to science and they will be bored out of their minds about it. They helped because these two men helped them care and showed them that there was something small they could do and convinced them that doing something was better than doing nothing. But people came out and said that doing something was just as bad as doing something. Maybe worse. So nothing it is. But it was cool to believe in something for a few minutes.
1. Billion dollar corporations produce plastics.
2. Billion dollar corporations ship plastics all over the world.
3. Billion dollar corporations sell plastics to billions of people.
4. Even in wealthy countries, like America with so-so trash management, the buying public throws the plastic trash on the ground.
5. Everyone blames the poor first.
6. 1970’s Woodsy Owl starts complaining about pollution.
7. The cycle begins again.
We have i think 3 of the floaty conveyor things here in Malaysia on the Klang River. I have lived in the general area of the river pretty much my whole life and pass it quite frequently and honestly the thing seems to be doing its work. The river appears cleaner and the water looks nicer. It still smells like a road gutter, but it's a step in the right direction
Yeah, there are more efficient and cheaper solutions, but also, it still helps. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of better
Why aren't they just pouring a small layer of gasoline on these rivers and just light it on fire? It would burn all the plastic in one shot!
If you manage to remove all the plastic from the water it doesn't really help because the plastic isn't disappearing, you are still stuck with it so it just moves the problem somewhere else.
And if gasoline isn't working good enough then we can drop napalm from planes and helicopters, this should be pretty effective!
@@Reth_Hard If you have no problems causing potentially serious air pollution with noxious gases from burning plastics, I guess that's a solution!
@@Reth_Hard I so wish this was a good idea lol. We'd call it "War on Trash" or something like that.
@@Reth_Hard That's like Burning the trash inside your house instead of throwing them away destined for the Landfill or Recycling plant. Yes the trash is gone, but the bad smell and toxic byproducts remains for you to breath in.
I think this is a microcosm of the biggest problem surrounding how we deal with environmental issues, our inability to upset the status quo in any way. Essentially unchecked progress in technology has resulted in plastic waste everywhere, loss of habitats and climate change. Instead of approaches - informed by science - that could mitigate impact in the first place there is a desire for a new technical solution that will simply make the problem go away. Technology is not magic, Marvel is not real. We have had the knowledge and technology for DECADES for all energy production to be green but doing that transition would have funnelled power and wealth away from those who had it. We have the solutions for plastic waste, we're just incapable of sacrificing anything to make it happen, instead let's hope a magic boat will sort it out instead.
your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could yadda yadda
Not just environmental issues. The idea that hand wave innovation will fix every issue eventually and we don't have to worry has become far too prevalent. Whether it is environmental issues, city planning or energy. It's very convenient for people who believe in the status quo. But closing your eyes to the issues and convincing yourself somehow everything will fix itself is not going to help anyone.
Your so called solution are still unaffordable to poor countries
@@johnmaris1582 this is not true, you can see some recent developments in Africa in green energy for example, and as time goes on and fossil fuels are further depleted, and green energy technology advances, fossil fuels will get more expensive while green energy gets cheaper. Try again
@@ff-qf1th dead wrong. Energy is just a part of the problem.
Keep in mind that The Interceptors are only half of what the Ocean Cleanup does. The other half right now is focusing on cleaning the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and there has already been some good progress. However, it may have the same problems as the Interceptors as you addressed. But at the end of the day, we should still be grateful for both of these solutions because they are still better than nothing~
as of today they have collected a little over 100 000 by the ocean clean up. Annually we put 4.3 Billion kg in to the ocean. This means what they have collected is the equivalent of what we put into the ocean every 15 minutes.
And the amount is projected to double by 2034.
This is the sad reality, what they are doing is not just less effective it's completely negligible. Don't get me wrong I donated to team seas before I knew this and I thought I was helping with the solution, it's unfortunately not the case, ocean clean up is not a part of the solution. It's just simply to ineffective, it's less then a rounding error, it distracts from real solutions.
exactly
Well Great Pacific Garbage is not some kind of island of garbage most of the plastic in there is scared and pea sized. And they are actually doing more harm than good while trying to fish plastic in there. With the numbers they provide in 2023 it will take around 24.000 Years to clean all the plastic in our oceans im not even including the future plastics that will end up in ocean. We need better solution for the problem. This is like bucketing out water from a sinking ship. Except you actually have a tea spoon instead.
The issue with any other possible solutions to waste-management - like producing less waste or disposing it in a responsible way - is that people just don't do it. Look at places where there are a number of trashbins after a festival (keeping in mind that in those areas there often are none) and you'll often find the bin half-empty and trash lying around 3m from it ... Of course that would be better, but we have to go with what can be done, not with what we wish would be done ... that would be similar to some party or other in Germany calling out for immediate peace in other parts of the world! Unrealistic!
Preventing *more* plastic and other waste entering our water ways is definitely the way to go. But...sooner rather than later we also need mechanisms to remove the plastic that is already out there. Ideally we'll want to do this before plastic decomposes into micro plastic as removing *that* is an even tougher nut to crack.
I respect the place you're arguing from, but saying that interceptors "don't work" is overly critical. While it may be more ecologically beneficial to prevent additional trash from entering river systems when compared to removing trash that is already there, *It is still valuable to take out the trash that is already there*. While select rivers may have subsurface plastics as the majority component, surface plastic is still the most prevalent in river systems according to current data, and interceptors effectively remove it. There is space for both waste management efforts to reduce waste entering rivers AND intercepts to take out plastic that is already there. This is a good initiative.
I think his point was scale. There is *so* much plastic flowing into the oceans that capturing it requires far more customization and consideration for the local environment *and* even if you do that, this isn't enough to capture a sizable percentage of the ocean fouling plastic.
@@x--. I would ask critical people like these that criticize people trying to help how many pounds of trash and debris they themselves have removed from the oceans. It's easy to be judgmental while also putting nothing into practice
@@joshua_J I don't think that is their intention. I feel that they just want to make it more effeicnt and help more people (more trash removed /$), not trying to say that the people that are helping are bad.
@@joshua_J if I write a law the requires a 20% reduction in plastic water bottles, how many pounds is that? Or better yet, if I lobby for a law that requires gov't trash cans every 50ft near waterways, how many? Or if I petition for trash collection in the slums on the city some? How many then?
Thank you for clearly articulating this obvious point/video rebuttable. Seriously. Like cmon, this is just clickbate video. One solution/effort being more effective than another doesn’t make the first effort “not work”. This video, somewhat disingenuously, implies that there cannot be efforts to prevent and cleanup in tandem. Smh
The interceptors are considered a "band aid" until the trash systems in those areas are improved, they weren't made as an end all solution and they explained that very much so in their videos.
Yeah this video just seemed like a bunch of people who are upset that they don't have the money to do anything about it, so they decided to trash the two people who are trying to do something about it.
Yeah, this video makes it like if doesn’t solve the cause it’s not worth solving.
Yes, there are places where the garbage disposal is not proper, guess what you can’t do anything about it because of the local government.
Yes, it’s a band aid, but when you need one you need one.
@@nicholasgeogalas2934 The proper place to place the blame is on the manufacturers for producing so much of it and doing so in a way that makes it hard to dispose of while lying to customers about the efficacy of recycling. One thing that has given me some hope was when Ball started to sell aluminum cups with only a tiny amount of plastic used to protect against aluminum exposure. They are very easily recycled and there's an established method of recycling them in most areas. Even where there isn't an established recycling system, you'd still be able to mine the local landfills for the aluminum later on as aluminum is incredibly resistant to corrosion once it gets that layer of aluminum oxide on it.
Ultimately, solutions like that are going to have to be where much of the focus is as aluminum can be recycled pretty much forever with just energy being lost each time. I think the cups are something like 99% aluminum.
@@SmallSpoonBrigade "The proper place to place the blame is on the manufacturers"
Not ONLY the manufacturers, but consumers as well.
There ARE non-packaging stores!
YOU HAVE AN OPTION.....
But I guess society just likes comfortable, sanatised one use Containers?!
@@TheCpadron19 missed the point.
it's actually the reverse of what you are saying.
The critics aren't trashing the "temporary solution" while doing nothing.
They are lamenting a situation where the better solution is available, but because of hip, shiny tech we won't get to those.
In the public's perception, this isn't a temporary fix, because it looks high-tech and cool, which is the reason investors go for this option (publicity and glamour, wow-factor). That tech-based future-optimism is actually preventing real solutions.
Ok, so you've explained very well why the interceptors are not an optimal solution: 1. they only collect on the surface and 2. the plastic that goes into the ocean is a tiny fraction of all plastic. You've stated three times, that the problem needs to solved at the roots, which is a platitude. Unfortunately, by only mentioning the alternatives and not explaining the science behind them, you've effectively reproduced the campaign of TeamSeas. As a viewer, I would like to know, what the better solutions would be and how they would compare against the interceptors. It feels like a missed opportunity to not talk about them...
Mmm yea, I noticed that too. I'm guessing that they never want to go into the specifics of a solution because that would make the video too long and people would lose interest.
Citations and extra info are all in the description. All you need to do is click it. You missed the opportunity, Simon didn't.
He also said multiple times that solutions change for each location because they each have different problems. At most you can blame him for not giving an example, but the main point of the video is that there isn't a magical, fix-all tech, and you seem to have missed it.
yeah, stupid video. No solutions given.
I was waiting for example of a better solution of the problem, but he never said them XD, it feels like a manipulation mostly becasue of the fact that there is not even a one example of a solution that we could compere to team sea interceptors :/
I agree, but those systemic solutions require governmental action across the whole world, TOC is out of their element here
This. There's only so much a nonprofit can do, especially with foreign political entities involved.
Exactly, even if these interceptors clean a tiny percentage of plastic, it still makes a difference. But, also they barely mentioned the other organization "Ocean Conservancy", which does work with the government
Not to mention 20M only goes so far to enforce and develop the alternate solutions that were proposed in the video
@@heychrisfox right the non profits job is to raise awareness of the issue
Also some parties believe in little government interference like conservatives so this is more than somebody making a video about what he doesn’t like about the work that others do. He needs to do something himself.
@@moniquewrites9046 To be clear, non-profits only job is not to raise awareness. Just like these non-profits, they have actual boots on the ground doing good work. And they're one of many different NGOs doing great work across the planet to solve these issues. Commentary, by itself, is the problem specifically. This guy can offer lots of theoretical ideas, but if they're not based in practicality, then they're just that: theories.
As someone already said don't try to find a single/ simple solution for a complex problem. The interceptors are not "the" solution for river plastic but rather "a" solution.
Personally I never took it that the interceptors were any type of ‘solution’ to plastic pollution, just a way to reduce plastic pollution, and they certainly do do that.
Now even such as 1% of plastic pollution is a lot of plastic for this worlds amount of plastic pollution, so while sure it might not sound like a lot, it still ends up being a pretty good amount of plastic.
And river clean up is something that needs to be done , it's not a pointless solution river polution can cause floods , affect wild life significantly , which ends up affecting fishing that affects the whole community , of course we need to target the problem in its roots , but that doesnt mean we dont also have to target river clean up, unfortunelly the video was very short sighted in this regard .
yeah it's like saying NGOs shouldn't exist because there are better ways to solve the problem. sounds ridiculous when you put it this way
Yes but the point is we have finite resources and funding and we have better tech and solutions we should be investing in. The money from team seas would be better invested elsewhere. Thats the point
Proper garbage disposal normally falls under the purview of local government. Let me know when the NGOs are running for office to really solve the problem.
In the meantime, I’d still like my rivers cleaned up please.
Perhaps, but spending that same money to pressure companies to not produce so much pointless plastic, improve recycling techniques for plastic that can't be avoided and educate people about how to dispose of the plastics would make an actual difference. WIthout that, it doesn't much matter how much of the easy to remove plastics you remove, it's not going to make a dent in the problem.
A big problem with the alternative solutions you didn't really address....the counties responsible for a lot of the river based plastic waste don't have particularly strong environmental agencies that can push for customized solutions at the source of waste...it's very easy to say X should be done, but if large corps have effectively bought environmental regulatory bodies in other countries, nothing will actually happen
This argument also seems to indicate the interceptor is a completely finished system that will receive no updates over it's lifetime, and never improve in efficacy or price
That argument isn't unique to the alternative solutions; the same can be said for the Interceptors. In this case, the reason it wasn't brought up is because it applies to everything pretty much equally. The same could be said about cultural ideas on environmental preservation, thoughts on technology, or available funding.
The problem is those countries can’t afford to do anything even if they did have an EPA. The people throwing garbage in rivers aren’t big cooperations you can fine and get them to change; they are poor people living in shacks who pollute because they can’t afford to go to the dump. How do you get them to care about the ocean when they are days away from starving or dying of disease
well, there are already better methods of cleaning up plastic than using these interceptors, so why wait for such updates or "improvements" to the interceptor if you could have been using a better method and efficient technology for doing it now?
@@x0cx102 such as?
Spoiler alert, they don't. The video just emphasized that it's complicated and complex "that they should stop it from the source" blah blah blah.
He kept mentioning this better way and better science without mentioning what made those solutions complicated other than geography.
Normally there should be pros and cons, but when you made it just purely negative other than it gives clout to ocean plastic. It just comes off as biased.
The main point of those machines is to build hype over the fact someone cares enough to make a change. This in turn creates more funding for more ambitious projects. It's far from a perfect solution as the creator has stated, but it's a start.
Agreed - it is so easy to criticize, whilst doing nothing.
@@SueFerreira75 they did a fking research declaring teamseas incompetence, they couldve running their own way to clean up the mess
yeah like "your solution is not good enough, and we not gonna do anything about it or the actual problem"
". This in turn creates more funding for more ambitious projects"
Case in point; ...?
@@biji_honi "yeah like "your solution is not good enough, and we not gonna do anything about it or the actual problem""
nope.
More like; "why would you choose to go this route, when they are better possibilities out there, and those solutions are widely documented..."
The answer is; it looks cool.
So not "we are not going to do anything" but "why don't you do somlething that actually works. There's a difference.
I have a few problems with this video:
#1. The alternative solution proposed in this video is essentially subsidized garbage collection services in 3rd world countries. This is not a $15 million problem, more like a $90 billion problem. Charities do not have the capital required for this kind of investment. On this front the Ocean Conservancy mostly does advocacy.
#2. So what if The Ocean Cleanup is doing the "easy part" of removing floating plastic from rivers. If no one else is doing that job, then it is undoubtedly a net benefit. Note, the much touted Ocean Conservancy does essentially the same thing with their beach cleanups, just with more manual labor.
#3. 15:23 why was this necessary? It only diminishes your point and makes you seem like a hater.
In conclusion, Team Seas is doing advocacy for healthier oceans by donating to The Ocean Conservancy while also doing the flashier but nonetheless helpful work of actually picking up garbage with The Ocean Cleanup. As you said yourself, they donated equally to BOTH charities. Why must we always be so cynical, just enjoy good people doing good things for once.
Edit: I think my comment keeps getting deleted because I was trying to post hyperlinks to sources. You can find my facts online on the Ocean Conservancy website.
Race bating is what they love to do. Opp Rich White bad I guess. Their options are moot and won't work.
The problem isn't that The Ocean Cleanup is causing net harm, it's that they're effecting net good *very* inefficiently on a plastic removed per dollar basis.
Team Seas is doing good work, but partnering with The Ocean Cleanup is not as effective as some of the other things they could have done.
1. Yup. It's a $90 billion problem. Or something like that. Which is why allocating what you *do* get as best as possible, is so important. Advocacy isn't enough, you have to get the ball rolling and rolling as fast you can.
2. Again, just because it's a good as in better than bad does not mean it's good as in *good* full stop. Improvement over doing nothing is not enough. Dusting the ants off a moldy piece of bread before eating it is better for you than with, going to therapy to overcome your moldy bread addiction is actually good for you.
3. It's a clip that points to a more inherent problem with their attitudes, is it not? What Simon says is true, it's a very literal description of what happened.
@@metroidisprettycool119 Yet everybody is talking about it, and mostly about the ocean cleanup, even if everybody would say 'they do a bad job' it might motivate more people to work against plastic polution. It's easy to critique what's out there, but if they are the biggest and most known, you must wonder why.. if others are so much better, it should be easy to promote.
@@metroidisprettycool119 I never said people were claiming The Ocean Cleanup is causing net harm. My point is that a 15 million dollar investment will do nothing to affect the systemic change required to solve this problem. You need millions of dollars of SUSTAINED investment to do that, i.e. subsidized garbage disposal. Therefore, instead of trying to compare The Ocean Cleanup to what governmental organizations can accomplish, it is only fair to compare them to other charities, i.e. The Ocean Conservancy, which, as stated above, does no better in terms of actual debris removed from the ocean (they simply do not have the necessary funds, i.e. billions of dollars).
tldr:
It is unfair to compare what The Ocean Cleanup can do on a small budget to what governmental organizations can accomplish with billions (in terms of efficiency and net benefit).
@@black_forest_ for me donating kept me more invested in the issue since then I collect plastic several times a week when I go outdoors.
Your comment sound very filled with anti capitalistic energy.
I think a lot of charity work of big companies isn't always so self centered
I talked to someone who worked in a department of a big company which was dedicated for charity projects and they had a lot of freedom to spend their budget. Maybe coca cola doesn't plan with maleficent intent were their 0,01 % of money goes when it's for a good cause as long as their name is written on it.
This really does feel like a view from study scientists. You can’t just say “it’s not the best solution so just do nothing”
Exactly, that’s the problem with this video’s mentality
Missed the point totally;
this video never states "“it’s not the best solution so just do nothing”"
They say "by doing this, it takes money, effort and attention away from the solutions that already exist and are better"
@@brmbkl The solutions that already exist and are better but are not being used to do anything about the plastic problem. If Ocean Cleanup uses money that "could" be used toward other efforts and actually cleans up the plastic what's the problem? These other solutions have been in place but have not been cleaning up or at the least not bringing awareness to the fact that our oceans and rivers are littered with tons of waste. Makes people think before they throw their plastic in the trash vs the recycle.
Here is an interceptor in use in California. ua-cam.com/video/BpYvhMinQoU/v-deo.html&ab_channel=TheOceanCleanup
@@brmbkl Except it doesn't. Taking the money and attention away from the solutions that already exist implies that that they would've generated this same level of interest, which they have not.
Although I agree with the premise of better solutions existing, my problem with this video is a lack of any quantification for the audience. What "solution" is waved over our heads in the video that is 80% effective, what is the cost of this solution. A solution costing 100x for 80% efficacy will most certainly not even survive with the limited funding that the interceptors work off of ($770,000 per Interceptor).
Ocean cleanup went through a bunch of iterations and is planning for more, I feel it's kind of unfair to try and declare these guys useless when they haven't even gone through a whole iteration yet.
This is a scam
As someone from a developing country: While I agree with some points here, I also completely disagree with some points.
The 'better solution' that has been mentined here all share significant problems: they are all complex solutions at best -- or hopelessly idealistic solution at worst.
Yes, there's no single silver bullet to every problem. But the solution here has some significant advantages: It's flashy for marketing purpose, it's easily quantifiable, has an easily visible output, and does NOT require complex coordination with locals. That last point is actually a good point.
Of course, stopping trashes from entering the river in the first place is a much better solution than stopping it in a single point before ocean. That solution is an obvious solution, but in reality it's a solution that is not a good solution for campaigns such as this in developing countries such as mine.
1. Improving/adding local landfill is the best solution that indeed we have to add as a priority, but even that still require much more significant cooperation with local government. Government (especially LOCAL government, not national level government) can be a really difficult entity for cooperation, and is not something that effectively solved by a crowdfunding campaign (you can't simply throw money to fix it).
2. There are a lot of logistic problems with moving trashes to said local landfills.
3. There are a lot of problems with people not putting trashes in the supposed place in the first place. Let alone sorting or recycling it.
4. There are a lot of problems with people throwing trashes to the rivers/waterway directly, and laws for this are not being enforced at all, etc.
I'm not saying those examples shouldn't/couldn't be tackled, there have been some improvements in those areas afterall. But they are really poor goals for big crowdfundings such as this. Cooperating with local governments is not only hard, but is also a source for ineffectiveness and corruptions. It's really hard to measure how effective the money are spent (compared to simple 1 dollar = x of trashes taken out). It will take a long time for the goal to be actually achieved. A lot of the process are not really visible and will need to be applied in a lot of places that you can't see all at once (compared to just observing one boat chugging trashes in a single point).
My other criticism is that the video repeats so many times that the ocean cleanup is not effective, but it doesn't tell how ineffective it is in a quantifiable comparison. Some of the other proposed 'solutions' are what I categorized as 'hoplessly idealistic'. Having companies to reduce or stop plastic production for packaging and battling against the force of economics and the lack of political will? Yeah, I don't think a youtube campaign could set that as a goal.
Again, we could and need to do them. #TeamSeas could attempt and bring more attentions to those solutions, but I believe that the current campaign is already pretty good and going with the 'perfect solution' would likely bring needless complexity and made the communication worse. We need to promote the 'perfect solution' as a long-term goal that we need to keep tackle after the crowdfunding, but a temporary solution such as this is perfectly fine. As many has pointed out: Perfect is the enemy of done.
Excellent points. I just wrote a comment to this sort of effect. Without your having to read through my entire dissertation, I basically said that setting Rober and Donaldson's goals equal in problem resolution to those made by the U.N., governments, or corporations is barking up the wrong tree. I stated that MrBeast and Mark Rober are simply trying to tackle a visible problem that people can rally behind. Sure, a good chunk of plastic is unseen 20 feet down or deep in a river bed, and therefore, Rober and Donaldson are not tackling the source. But again, that's not the purpose of their crowdfunding campaign. I basically categorized human action into three levels: 1. actual action by the people, 2. action based on heavy research, science, and backing by governments and corporations, 3. prevention of future pollution through policies, fines, systems, and infrastructures. Clearly, Team Seas was tackling number 1, not numbers 2 and 3.
I actually really like the quote „Perfect is the enemy of done“. Thanks for sharing it, it’s actually really true, if you want something to be perfect you might never end up finishing because there’s always stuff to improve
This whole comment section and personally for me, this comment, has been a real eye opener. Thanks for sharing your thoughts!
He seems to be conflating 2 completely different issues in the video, the cause and the cleanup. Both need to be address. But saying that their solution to cleanup is faulty because it doesn't address the cause is mind numbingly backwards. And then suggesting that the improvement to their method would be to stop the source just compounds the confusion. Thats like a coke delivery guy dropping a pallet of cans on the store floor and having them explode all over and instead of cleaning it up his solution is to never deliver coke there again. There you go problems solved no coke will ever be spilled here again, except we still have tons of coke all over the floor that needs to be cleaned up. Not delivering coke there didn't solve the stores problem.
Thanks for a great post. And yes, Simon Clark has enough education under his belt to know that "quantifiable" is a thing. I suspect this video is about Simon Clark.
My main question with this video is
1) Do the better solutions make use of money as well? It's all very well to say we need systematic change - we do - but you can't achieve systematic change with a few million dollars. You can buy a robot to lower the amount of plastic waste entering the ocean.
2) Is it diverting reasorces that would better be used elsewhere? Or is it generating new investment into plastic reduction that otherwise would not exist? I.E. Is it actually competing with other solutions, or is it just existing on top of them. There's a lot of people who will donate to a shiny technological solution that otherwise couldn't be pursuaded to help
Exactly. See my diatribe I posted recently as well. I question the motives in the creation of this video a lot, because, as you noticed, there are some false comparisons being made.
1) Yes better solutions need money, but a big scientific study from 2020 found that "we can cut annual flows of plastic into the ocean by about 80% in the next 20 years by applying existing solutions and technologies." So why not put $15 mil (The River Cleanup's cut), toward those already-known solutions? IMO if we're going to spend money, it should be toward the proven-to-work stuff, not for a stopgap.
2) The answer is actually yes to both your questions, but in a really unsavory way. Team Seas vouches for The Ocean Cleanup to a whole bunch of followers, who may then continue to donate to Team Seas or The Ocean Cleanup into the future (diverting resources away from other solutions). Team Seas/The Ocean Cleanup also serves as a "greenwashing" mechanism for companies who want to invest in plastic reduction in a way that doesn't require them to actually contribute to long-term solutions, while still looking like they're doing good for the environment. For example, Coca Cola has a terrible (documented) track record of actively squashing recycling initiatives and consistently not meeting/moving the goalposts on what they say they'll do for plastic reduction in-house, but they're one of the Interceptor's biggest backers. In that case, they otherwise can't be persuaded to help AND SO they are donating to a shiny technological solution.
@@vgwschutte Even thou I'm aware of the greenwashing been made by companies on partnership like Coca-Cola, its pretty bad and unapologetic, I'm not convinced it doesn't have a net positive toward conservation. It's hard to me to imagine that this kind of campaign would actually hurt others instead of maybe boosting them. Sure, they won't be solving shit themselves but this campaign wouldn't have gotten as big without their marketing focus and I feel like we can at least start the conversation more seriously to a lot of people.
Just my perception.
@@vgwschutte I've got a few issues with this video. While I think it has a point, it tends to shy away from revealing better solutions in favor of criticizing the way things are. For example, I noticed your 80% statistic was taken from the video, and it notes that there are better solutions. So, the question becomes "what are those better solutions and technologies?" The video doesn't really answer that question beyond saying systematic change. Also, I think the video is very misleading with these statistics. For example there was that statistic that sayed only 2% of plastic makes it into the ocean (that number may be wrong, Im going from memory), which is misleading because it accounts for all plastic pollution whereas Team Seas is specifically looking at water based plastic pollution (particularly that of the ocean).
Ots small details like that that can really mislead the audience and that detract from his argument.
@@vgwschutte Existing [obvious and very hard] solutions according to PEW:
1) Reduce plastic production growth to eliminate all avoidable plastic use
2) Design recycling-friendly products for the unavoidable uses
3) Increase mechanical recycling capacity
4) Build better temporary disposal facilities
5) Substitute plastic for alternatives
6) Improve waste collection in middle- and low-income countries
7) Develop plastic-to-plastic chemical conversions (i.e. not yet existing solution)
8) Reduce plastic waste exports
All PEW thinks we need to do it is $70B, plus making big changes to major industries, and making major policy changes in all countries. Yup, sounds easy. Especially considering that $0.015B was raised for Ocean Cleanup, and that industries are governed mostly by financials (and laws), not (scientific) opinions. These solutions have probably been known for several decades.
I've seen these interceptor style things working in rivers and even if it's only getting 40% of the plastic in the river, thats still a ton of plastic. They were literally swapping out dumpsters because they were getting filled up quickly. Is it a perfect solution? 100% not. But its still a good idea. Let these take on the easy pickin's surface plastics while getting the message out regarding polluting and then work on a new tech for submersed plastics. Who knows. Some kid seeing that will then start to pick up 5 pieces of trash a day.
This same logic goes for almost every global non profit issue. It's more important to spread the message of "Hey this problem matters and we actually could fix it"
Even the best nonprofit's have a marketed solution that doesn't solve the overall problem. Whether it's saving trafficked girls to planting trees, none of it actually does anything to solve the REAL issue, it mostly just raises awareness for people to care and feel it IS possible to stop, and must be stopped.
But the problem with showing „simple“ solutions like that is that most people will donate to the cause and then feel like they’ve done their part
How many people who donated to teamseas actually ended up reducing their own plastic waste? I would bet that at least 90% of people are still using single use plastic regularly and aren’t trying to actively avoid it at the very least
@@NA-yq4pe as much as it sucks, thats pretty much all you can do other than being politically active. Personal responsibility only goes so far. Even if Im willing to give all my time and effort towards a cause I just won't have much of an effect
@@NA-yq4pe Being honest with the public on how much needs to be done to solve the problem will just make them give up. Most of what needs to be done is political and right now nearly everyone feels powerless on that front. Having hard working people raise 15 million is great but we need world governments to invest trillions and I don't see that being done until millennials rule the world in around 20 years. We will eventually fix things but the people in power know they will die before things get too bad for them and just don't care. I have actually heard people in their 70s say that it wont matter in their lifetime so they don't worry about it.
I think you misunderstood the project.
Half of the money is spend on taking waste out of the ocean and the other half is spend on trying to reduce the amount of waste going into the ocean.
The aim wasn’t to clean up rivers and it wasn’t to put a robot at the end of every river but to stop most of the pollution coming from areas with no waste management.
(Till local governments or the UN can provide waste management)
If that does cut the amount of waste entering the ocean in half es the guy from the Netherlands said, then this is a huge success.
*And no, I somehow doubt that the problem in the poorest of regions is large plastic waste leaking through.
It’s obviously through away stuff in these areas causing most of the pollution.
Your research is undoubtedly true yet it doesn’t reflect the purpose and the successes of these machines.
The entire point was that the taking the waste out part was grossly ineffective use of resources and possible has negative knock-on effects that could negate attempts to reduce waste going in.
@@tams805 the whole point was to miss characterize a few studies and to be pedantic, the 2% figure mentioned was more all plastic pollution and was used to criticize a project working only on ocean pollution, that plus the title is obvious click bait
Exactly
The audacity of Simon to think that a former NASA engineer didn’t think this all the way through
@@loukasfrantzolas6494 yep that’s also he’s just trying to increase his following
I don’t like how he portrayed mark and mr. Beast as incompetent this was insulting
Let's criticize people who are actually doing something about the problem while offering no better solutions other then idealized blue sky wishful thinking. Great video.
they do offer solutions...
Everything you say the ocean cleanup should be doing, is what they're doing as far as I've seen. I've seen them talk about stopping the plastic waste at the true source, but that's a much harder problem, that's better handled by the local government. I'm pretty sure I've seen them working on solutions that can stop plastic deeper in the river.
What you think are bad aspects of ocean cleanup is IMO good:
1. Doing flashy but less effective projects that give them attention and funding.. they started with the great pacific garbage patch because it's headline grabbing. But they clearly followed the science and started tackling rivers first. Again, the interceptor isn't the most effective, but it's a useful solution to some problems and it's headline grabbing.
2. They're making solutions we're going to need eventually. We should clean up the great pacific garbage patch eventually and we might as well start developing solutions now.
3. They're clearly moving in the direction of what science says we should focus on. But they're not letting scientific idealism get in the way doing what it takes to get funding, which should always be their #1 priority.
Put another way, if we do have effective solutions for stopping plastic at the source, and others are working at that... isn't it good that they're working on one of the problems the rest aren't? The great pacific garbage patch is still a problem, even if it isn't the biggest one. We can work at multiple things in parallel.
And your video isn't bad either, I mean we *should* use TeamSeas and OceanCleanup to funnel more attention to all ocean/river cleanup projects. It motivated me to find and donate to a local cleanup project.
This is a fantastic video, however on the point of "lower income countries focusing on improving waste collection" is literal insanity, the primary issue is that countries in the developed world have been shipping our waste to poorer nations under the guise of recycling for decades. Improving their waste management programs misses the fact that most of the garbage that is leaking into the oceans is imported from countries that do not want to process their own waste. Its such a big issue that many nations especially lower income nations have followed the Chinese example of outright banning the import of foreign waste, and many island nations such as the Philippines perform regular "trash audits" where they monitor that amount of trash that comes from different countries and issue fines to the companies that are importing it and try to spread awareness about how the plastic waste from the US/Canada/UK and Europe are some how showing up on their shores by the ton.
Even looking at this from a cultural stand point, many if not most lower income countries especially Indian regions and south pacific countries were low yield, local production locations which relied on using reusable and sustainable packaging, single use plastic and mass produced goods are really only a thing that started showing up since the 80s in many of these places that are deemed to be heavy polluters. The only reason that single use plastics are showing up in these places at all is through western influence and corporate expansion, even in the modern developed nation single use plastics didn't hit their stride until the late 70s early 80s before then it was very common to be able to purchase what you needed with a container that would be returned cleaned and reused, milk bottles are a cultural meme, but everything used to work that way.
The world's plastic waste problem is a global issue affecting 8 billion people, cause overwhelmingly by a few multi-national corporations that really only serve 1 billion people, and are trying to expand to 3-4 billion.
He just made the video for the adsense to talk shit about something alot of people know about and like.
So disappointed by the "solutions" at the end of the video. "Control underdeveloped people and multi-national corporations." Neat.
@@virtualalias That is why the interceptors exist. If you could just wave your hand and get people more concerned about plastic than..where there next meal is coming from, we would have done it already. And most poor nations will put up with multi0nationals as again..priorities.
Reminds me how a LOT of e waste end up in africa
There are hacker groups who go around searching for e waste that still works to get information from the computers and either use it in direct attacks or blackmail
"the fact that most of the garbage that is leaking into the oceans is imported from countries that do not want to process their own waste"
Citation needed for this claim.
While I think that stopping plastic from going in the ocean in the first place is very important you didn’t really propose another solution for plastic that has already entered the river. Organizing waste management on international scale is really difficult to do.
If your toilet bursts and starts spilling sewage into your house, do you start by frantically cleaning up the sewage? Or do you first stop the flow?
@@SuperSMT Best analogy I've read
@@SuperSMT Great analogy. I would do neither of those things though. I would just stand there and keep telling my wife who's trying to prevent the sewage from flowing into the living room that she really should stop doing that and tackle the problem at the source.
Except the Ocean Cleanup is working incredibly hard to do that. Go to their channel and look at the podcast where they talk about it. It just doesn’t make for a good UA-cam video so no one has heard about it.
If Team Seas is about removing x amount of plastic from the ocean, does it matter, that they choose an inefficient method of getting to that x amount?
Does it matter if you clean 1 river when you could have cleaned 5 at the same cost? I'd say it matters. How does it not matter?
Assuming that that mission statement "We are going to remove [exactly] x amount of plastic from the ocean" is actually true, and they put funding into these organizations until that x amount of plastic was removed and then they stop, it makes no difference how efficient that removal was, as they would have removed that x amount of plastic wither way. I am aware that that sounds retarded, but If that is what they are going to advertise by, that's the conclusion I have to make. In reality, they probably won't operate like this and it does make a difference then.
@@duncanrobertson6472 That statement has so many underlying assumptions in it though. If you were talking about convincing one person to invest a fixed amount of money into some organization to reduce plastic pollution, then your statement would obviously true. But we're talking about 2 influencers and a small campaign team, trying to capture some attention of millions of people, motivating them to invest. So I think the conversion rate is very important. E.g. if they'd make a less capturing video it might have reached 10 or 100 times fewer people, and it'd hurt the influencers' pockets and career a lot more too. Their entire career relies on sustaining really high retention and CTR and can easily be lost.
@@duncanrobertson6472 the thing is using something that is unflashy is a problem since it doesn't look as good in UA-cam videos which would cause less donations over time. Flashy things bring more.money and more money mean a better ability to clean up
@@duncanrobertson6472 So why aren't all these filthy rich universities cleaning those 5 rivers? They clearly have the money.
Instead of these academics bitching about someone else they should stop wasting billions on Administrators and actually demonstrate their superior versions?
By the time any solution gets implemented there will always be something more effective, it feels harsh to say things like this about an initiative that's actually doing something and actively working to try to fix an issue.
There are always haters. This video is a proof
I find that the video very heavily criticises TeamSeas for doing a good thing that is not good enough and hints at solutions being complicated. So complicated that Simon himself can not actually mention any of them in the video itself. TeamSeas on the other hand was able to come up with something that people could take part in and start helping NOW, and at least bring awareness to the topic. In this video we are basically told that there are other more complex solutions that should be implemented, but does not give the view a real call to action.
It's seem to me that Simon is letting perfect be the enemy of the good. The garbage collected by the interceptors is not adding that in the ocean = GOOD. Awareness of people that saw the video and who might try to help in someway = GOOD. Yes there is much more to do, but he seems to like bringing TeamSeas back as a punching bag when he did not really need to.
Its super frustrating to watch. He basically accuses the TeamSeas group of only doing it for publicity and not for actual change, where I guarantee if the $32 million raised went to pay governments to care more, would be 100% squandered and wasted at best, pilfered at worst. The solution was basically "Stupid rich white guys, quit telling us wat to do! The real way to fix it was to get every government in the world to magically care about pollution and then implement systematic change to properly handle plastic waste so it doesn't end up in the water to begin with." Like, no duh, Sherlock. But have you been paying attention to environmental causes for the last 50 years? If we could do that with $32 million, climate change would have been solved. You are not going to get permission to catch waste at every dumping side in a river, but you can at least prevent some outlet at the rivers mouth. Nobody thought this would stop ocean garbage, its a Band-Aid at best. I'd also argue that a large portion of the money raised was done so BECAUSE of the big shiny tech. Just like TeamTrees has drone planting bots. Is it the most practical? No. Does it draw attention and get donations? Yes. Then a portion of that money gained can go to a good cause. If the campaign was "Donate money to us so that we can use it to beg governments to provide trash services in disadvantaged countries that are already suffering from food scarcity, but the problem is really complex guys so just give us your money and we promise it will be put to the best use science will offer!" I doubt they would break a million. The TeamX program has always been about ACTION. That your money will go directly to a tangible thing and can be tracked as such. Nothing presented in this video provided that, and just came across and a spoiled guy mad about not getting the same exposure and saying he could have done it better.
Amen
This guy is a dingbat
Facts. If there is a better way do things it would be better to lead by example instead of simply criticizing others for trying.
He mention waste management many times. I disagree with this video as well in many points, but the solution was at least somewhat pointed out (waste management, contact experta etc.)
This does not hit the nail on the Head. The main issue posed is ''Why is solution X not solution Y, Y is better'' which is false dichotomy, this is a YES AND problem.
Further, if solution Y is better, but Y is a collection of regionally-specific solutions, and X is a specific one, X is probably a subset of Y
Further, if data is not available (min 13ish) then there is no Y
In addition, the ''following recent flashy science'' thing is fair in general, but weird in specific here. Rocket science is not new, the engineering is new. Tony Stark Science is fiction, Team Seas science would be, i dont know, archimedes? conveyor belts are probably ancient. The Engineering is new. You cannot read a science paper and just apply it, it needs actual field work, and pushing back on field work will not help, it creates inaction, which is worse than picking the nth most optimal solution.
It's worth mentioning, that the solutions at about min 15 could be pushed back on in this same way. Single use plastics will probably be replaced with something heavier, inducing more air polution for transport. Which is not to say that we shouldnt replace them, but that this is not a good lens to view the problem from.
I think you are overestimating how big a campaign this is, because it exists in your space and is personal to you. 32m is a big number, but similarly does not move the needle for things like changing global infrastructure. It does clean up some trash though.
You put many of my counter-criticisms well here. And just to put the scale of this into perspective: The 80% reduction analysis by PEW estimated that $70B would be needed to pull their solutions off (plus major global industry and policy changes). TeamSeas have roughly raised 0.05% of that amount.
Exactly, this video was a huge waste of time, "X isn't perfect, we should be doing Y", but Y is this complete impossibility for anyone but some imaginary worldwide Dictator so we should just sit back and do nothing. I think most people understand that pollution as a whole is a loop and can really only be fixed over an enormous period of time. These groups are just working to make a surface level difference which is at least something.
interceptors attempt to solve one part of the problem, other non-profits can step in to solve the other ones. this is going to be a team effort.
You are WRONG.
I greatly appreciate this video, it's been very educational. Have you seen some of "ocean clean ups" latest videos? They released a series of videos explaining similar problems to what you discussed. They touch on needing different solutions for each river, they also talk about changing the populations mindset so that they pollute LESS among other steps that need to be taken in order to solve the "plastic problem" as a WHOLE.
This hits the nail on the head. We have the technology, the expertise and apparently the public will and potentially means to make real headway on some of the real issues in the world. All we need now is for the ones with the money and fame to make it happen to actually direct their power to the most effective (if not the flashiest) place
this is SUCH a great way to phrase it! there's a report that came out by a group of experts on 2020 that concluded "we can cut annual flows of plastic into the ocean by about 80% in the next 20 years by applying existing solutions and technologies." which... !!.... let's goooo!!!!
though, of course, the ones with all the money and fame are only interested in generating more money and fame, and using the most flashy way possible is the most effective way to do that
The ones who get money and fame from the status quo will never be interested in changing it, that would jeopardise their money. The status quo can only be changed when those with money think that it must be changed in order to prevent it from collapsing (reform) or if those at the bottom change it by force (revolution).
"All we need is people with money to make it happen" is not a solution. It just restates the problem.
All we need for world peace is to get the people with military power to make it happen.
All we need to stop racism is for people who have the opportunity to treat everyone equally to do so.
All we need to stop theft/murder/adultery/greed/etc is for everyone with free will to stop doing bad things.
Meanwhile there are other people with a lot more money (and less fame) who will spend whatever it takes to fight against even awareness of the issue, because there is money to be made in so-cheap-its-disposable packaging.
I feel like the complexity here is that we’re kind of comparing a greater solution that is defined with a lot of politics mixed in and a lesser solution which is defined as primarily an issue of raising money. Defining the problem as a complex problem requiring all kind of boots on the ground and unknown engagement with unknown entities makes ordinary viewers feel like the problem is unsolvable or that if there is a solution, not one that we have a part in.
As a person who is not ready to change my career to become a plastic cleanup lobbyist, the question that I really want to know is where is the most effective place I can put donations? If Ocean Cleanup is not the best place to put dollars, where is that? Because I might not be willing to become a full time advocate now, but if you can step me into a quick actionable first step (like a 15 second donation click), that might step me into such advocacy later.
River cleanup is one here mentioned, voting in general is good as well
@@motherlove8366 Voting is a luxury of western democracies. It's a privilege. A lot of the places where ocean waste comes from don't have those luxuries.
@@heychrisfox Now to be fair, a lof of the plastic gets delivered from the western world, however its not like you can stop this by voting. Consider America, there are exactly 2 choices, both have the exact same effect. In other countries there are more choices, but your vote won't change shit their either.
Its an economic development issue. It will take decades for those countries to grow to the point where they do not have slums anymore and you will not get good garbage collection in slums.
The Ocean Conservancy, which is the other partner for the Team Seas campaign, has a proven track record of incredibly successful action- they blend worldwide, coordinated beach cleanups that gets lots of attention with research, policy development, and advising that tackles the longer-term stuff. 15 s to read, I hope- you can't go wrong with an Ocean Conservancy donation!
I think it's clear that a lot of science and evidence based charities and orgs are doing the right thing, but it's obvious the community does not know how to market or get people excited worth a lick. And i think that's what TeamSeas unlocked a bit. Instead of giving TeamSeas a hard time for receiving so many donations, i think it's absolutely worth to study what they did right and how to channel those things to orgs that you care about. Yes the interceptor has time spent on how it looks and how it's marketed instead of pure research time, but the design and marketing is a tool to get it in front of as many peoples' eyes as possible. Charities and orgs need to see that as a good thing, because a lot of people like me feel its better to get something off the ground than to always be imagining better solutions without putting forth an actual working solution.
The thing I admire about Ocean Cleanup is they have spent years researching the problem and developing and modifying their methods. They actually moved forward and implemented their ideas. Systematic change would of course be the best solution but in the meantime what are we supposed to do? 15 million for new waste management infrastructure is a joke.
you overestimate the research.
quote from their own website; "At 16 years of age, Boyan Slat saw more plastic bags than fish when scuba diving in Greece. He thought: “Why can’t we just clean this up?” This question led him to research the plastic pollution problem for a school project. He learned about plastic accumulating in five large oceanic gyres, the largest one being the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. In 2012, Boyan Slat held a TedX talk about how to rid the world’s oceans of plastic using technology. The video went viral, and the momentum that followed allowed him to drop out of school and found The Ocean Cleanup.
After many years of research, development, testing, and iteration, The Ocean Cleanup now has technologies to intercept plastic in rivers before it reaches the ocean, and technologies to remove the plastic that is already out there-debris that has been building up for decades."
The tech is pretty much the same as in 2012.
Unwittingly, they admit their problem a few lines further; "OCEAN SYSTEMS
Plastic, once trapped in a gyre, will slowly break down, fragmenting into pieces called microplastics. Microplastic debris (< 5mm) is not only more challenging to clean up but is also easily mistaken for food by marine life."
they're research even disproves their methodology. Seven Clean Seas spends money in the right places
they're?@@benmoody8149
What I see is some energetic people undertaking an experiment in improving the environment, which may or may not prove to be successful in the long term, but does not appear to have any downside. The amount of money involved is also, in the grand scheme of things, not huge. In tackling the problems of pollution and climate change, there will, and should, be multiple approaches, some of which will fall by the wayside, and others which will prove viable and be upscaled. I think for Dr. Clark and Dr. Shutte to say that only the best solution will do is to invite inertia in expectation of some Utopian formula which may never arrive.
Simon argued that this isn't some random campaign, it's the most popular campaign. At least here on UA-cam or something like that.
@@Winnetou17 Yes, and that seems to be the problem that Drs. Clark and Schutte have with it. MrBeast and Mr. Roper use their massive reach to raise some money, and donate half of it to an organisation that they don't approve of. Little is made of the equal donation to Ocean Conservancy, of whom they apparently do approve , despite the controversies surrounding their approach to plastic clean-up. Given the budget differences between the two organisations, I'd call that a win for Ocean Conservancy.
Dr. Clark also criticises The Ocean Cleanup for taking 'greenwashing' money from large corporations, when some of the same names appear on Ocean Conservancy's list of partners. He also insinuates that The Ocean Cleanup is more interested in perpetuating it's funding for the benefit of the participants than anything else. It's an accusation that non-profits sometimes get from their detractors, and is usually, but not always, not true. I see no evidence that it is true here.
@@juvenalsdad4175 The greenwashing is a pretty big problem. Many entities with a lot of money are actively seeking to greenwash in order to avoid public outrage and regulations. Giving them more options to greenwash is really not good. And if the majority of the money raised are from companies or entities that usually pollute and abuse like hell, then it's really no progress at all.
@@Winnetou17 I would agree that a lot of corporate donations to environmental organisations are made out of self-interest, but that is not a huge surprise. They regard the sums spent as a good investment for improving their ESG scores if their actual action on environmental matters is somewhat lacking. It does not explain, however, why Dr. Clark would highlight the 'greenwashing' associated with one organisation, and not the other.
The downside being that it wont change peoples behaviours and they will feel "glad" that they did something, while not changing their habits.
The attitude presented in the video is the problem, that nothing should be done until a complete solution is implemented. The Interceptors (and Mr. Trash Wheel) are part of the solution, but demanding that poor countries that generate most ocean pollution switch to expensive alternatives to platic and implement massive waste management plans are unrealistic.
Yea asking 2 youtubers to alter the way plastic is produced, used and disposed of is totally reasonable. I'm sure that 30mil dollars is enough to convince every country on earth to ban plastic and fund the waste management system of every country. Thank you for the amazing video that totally doesn't feel like an attempt to make some quick and easy money off of a charity with great intentions.
You forgot to preface that with "A cynic might say".
"Perfect is the enemy of good"
Without trying to justify anyone (because I don't know if they're good or not) what I can say is that scientists are good at science and NOT good at economics, politics, entrepreneurship, etc.
They can tell you what the optimal solution is but that's usually "in theory" and not viable, practical approach; In this particular case they're saying "customize your solution for every scenario" and that's nonsense from a production standpoint, there's a reason factories and mass-production exists people, developing custom solutions COSTS MONEY (and money is just an abstraction of effort).
So a less ideal solution you can deploy everywhere is BETTER than a custom solution that you'll only deploy once because you don't have enough resources to keep customizing (whether that "less ideal" solution is this company is a different matter).
The same goes with the motto "remove plastic from the source" sure, if we don't had plastic we wouldn't have pollution but we can't take take plastic out of the equation without wrecking the economy so that's not an option.
I would say it's easier to propose an ideal solution than a viable one but we don't fix the world by wishing it.
True I mean if these guys in the video had something better presumably they'd have given us some examples rather than vague generalities about "embracing the complexity"
you dont need to destroy the economy but making drinks use glass bottles instead of plastic would probably cut more than half of plastic pollution.
@@thatundeadlegacy2985 the fact that you think those two options cost the same is the reason we can't solve this issue, you would absolutely destroy the economy if put in charge
@@SamusUy oh noooo we cant have plastic bottles the economy dies,
the rest of the world isnt funded by soda like murica is.
@@thatundeadlegacy2985 So basically you say "just use glass bottles". That may work for people in the west but not for people in the third world.
so happy to see people on the front line making a difference!!!!
Yes, instead of sitting in their cushy offices crunching numbers 🙄
As it is said:
"filtering the plastic at the outlet of the rivers should be a last resort". To my knowledge we are already far past this point.
"If there is the will and knowledge there are better solutions". I don't see any will in the last decades that has solved these issue to a acceptable level.
It is not because something has been invented before that makes a copy is a scam if it serves the purpose.
consumption
It's like saying little Charlie spilled a glas of milk on the kitchen floor:
The message in this video is: Should have not given a glas of milk to Charlie in the first place. There are some special bottles that don't spoil the content when dropped. And the person cleaning the mess up is a scam because they use a kitchen mop wich is not new technology.
In the end the mess has to be cleaned up.
Now you can discuss about thousand ways to do it properly, but you have to start somewhere and the approach taken since thousands of years is to clean it up!
Kudos for starting the cleanup and not just talking about it!
I think a big part of why Ocean Cleanup chooses its methods is marketing. Removing a pound of plastic from the oceans for every dollar received sounds infinitely times better than contributing to all the other more vague solutions, even when they're way more useful. I'm confident that TeamSeas chose them mainly out of misinformation, but utilizing this way of promoting the charity must've been a huge plus too.
The argument cuts both ways. The reason that it's so difficult to hold academics accountable for their failures to fix anything is because the abstraction they use in describing their solutions is so unquantifiable and, as you say, vague, that you can never pin them down. At least with a stupid slogan like "one pound per dollar" you can get a scale, measure the plastic, and know that they've failed.
@@neildutoit5177 Those slogans are often so simple that no one checks them and they most of time turn out false. Not saying that is the case here. Acedemia usualy qualifies their statements so they are as accurate as possible. It doesn't matter if it is usefully right or not, as long as you follow the procedure we will eventualy get there.
How many other charities do you know about off the top of your head dedicated to removing plastic from the environment?
Marketing is important, and the argument that there are more useful solutions is ancillary to the fact that they are working to remove plastic from the environment.
Those more useful solutions are generally economically and bureaucratically prohibitive.
god damn, if someone would pay me a dollar for every pound of trash I picked up out of rivers my city would be fucking gleaming
hell with all the money they raised they would have been better off just going to a bunch of universitys around the country and paying broke ass students a dollar for every bit of crap they could pull off the beach or rivers
@@randomcow505 I recently heard a quote that goes something like, "It takes one person to clean up two pieces of litter to clean an entire neighborhood." There is a lotter of waste out there, but SOMEBODY - literally anybody - doing the work nobody wants to do makes a way bigger difference than academics are willing to admit.
I donated 30 dollars to Teamseas back in 2021. I wasn't aware of the fact that 30 million pounds of trash is an extremely small portion of the entire ocean trash. I wish I knew this information earlier. Should've just spent my 30 dollars for a book or something.
I am going to have to go through their videos again, because I am pretty sure some of your criticisms have already been covered by the Ocean Cleanup group. First off is the idea that the interceptors are being offered as a one size fits all solution. Maybe when they started they might have thought that, but recent videos have really pushed the fact that they are increasingly realising that every river is different and needs different solutions.
Second is they often talk about working with local communities to educate and look for solutions to the problems being faced that cause the pollution. The interceptors are put in place and are run and maintained by locals. I am not aware of the specifics, which is why my response to the criticisms is not a fanboy rant, but I feel they are at least talking about these issues.
Third, with regard to the science, as far as I can see this is at the heart of what they are doing. Their research into where the pollution is coming from, finding the rivers that are doing the most damage, using machine learning to monitor and build models of pollution and even realising there is a huge problem with where all the plastic is going if so little is visibly making it into the ocean is all underpinned by science.
I suppose the response to this video is up to them, but if I was them my response would be that the mission was to raise awareness and do something about the ocean garbage patches. They started with the bigger ocean cleanup mission and then realised that this was fundamentally flawed because how can you clean the ocean if you don’t stop the flow of plastic into the ocean in the first place? This is where the idea of the interceptor came from. When it comes to sorting out refuse collection and stopping plastic use in the first place, somebody else needs to start doing something about that. The scale of the problem means it will take multiple stakeholders to fix it.
The critique wasn’t what I was expecting, and the fact it was backed up by science gives it a sense of validity, but it also doesn’t mean my support for the ocean clean up is going to end.
This video is what we like to call a strawman. Neither of the two organizations this guy criticizes claims that their campaigns and/or technology will clean up all the plastic in rivers and oceans.
TeamSeas does work. It removes literal tons of garbage and plastic from our oceans. It doesn't solve all problems but criticizing partial solutions doesn't seem like a good way to try to save the environment.
This same concept is going to be super important for combating climate change. We are not going to find the perfect solution right away, but we should cheer on any incremental step towards this goal.
I see these efforts as one part of the solution, keep up with team seas and skimming rivers for trash, build further infrastructure to keep trash out of the water in the first place. Each idea we have to contribute to this problem is like another paragraph in the essay we need to write.
Yes, but now why do I want to go on a nice bromantic rowboat journey with you?
Gosh! Never seen so much shade thrown at Ocean Cleanup. Sad. They're doing a fine job. Easier to be an armchair critic, than to go out and actually DO something. Right?
Well… i don’t agree that the interceptors is a bad idea given that it the will take a lot of time to get proper infrastructure in place to actually recycle plastic locally.
We both need this kind of new technology AND better systems for managing the waste locally.
In Lithuania there's nets at the end of the sewage system that goes into the rivers, and I think once a week they collect all the trash that is trapped in it and take it somewhere else. It is not a perfect system, but it does stop the biggest things from entering our rivers in the first place
The summary of this video. If you can't fix the problem, don't do anything at all. We all know the solution to plastic in the river is making sure plastic doesn't go into that river. The issue is getting a local government to do anything about it is impossible. So next best thing to try to minimize damage. Which is what Ocean Cleanup is and is pretty clear of this.
"So that means the corporations that produce the plastic..." yeah unfortunately that is going to be a very difficult fight. Huge corporations seem to be fervently opposed to spending a single cent on environmentalism unless they can spin it as a PR stunt (but only if it doesn't actually have a substantial effect on the status quo)
this is so true and yet doesnt have to be, for instance coca-cola already sells glass bottles in a lot of countries for the same price, and fewer countries for limited editions for the same price, so cost isnt the opposition in this case its just easier to manufacture the quantity in plastic.
summary of the video: youtuber A with the help of random scientists bashes youtubers B and C who try to help cleaning up plastics.
First team clearly spends more time doing powerpoints than picking up anything but the logic is: "if you cant do it perfectly then just sit on your hands".
Great content.
Did you watch the video? He debunked your comment before you made it 🤡
"It's defining and quantifying your problem, if you don't know what the problem is, it will be extremely difficult to tackle it and demonstrate that you have solved the problem." This is also some of the best relationship advice I've heard in a while too XD
The problem with the "other solutions" is corruption. Sure we'll try to empower the communities, but those who are in charge would usually squander the money or put it to their pockets and do as little as possible anyway.
Because there is no corruption in non profits, the one in this video is literally getting money from Coca Cola to greenwash, there will always be corruption.
The possibility of corruption shouldn't stop trying to achieve a solution, it just requires taking it into account and trying to prevent it.
both yes and no
He really expected my third world government to do those community engagement stuffs to clean their river lol
The focus on picking up plastic discounts companies who produce plastic. In itself, cleanup is needed but it's also needed for particles smalles than a 1mm.
Exactly. And coca-cola will slap a "each bottle sold contributes to cleaner oceans" sticker on their bottles, and give the ocean cleanup a donation of $10,000, while pumping out more plastic.
I agree with the overall sentiment, but we need to look at what we can do as individuals. I regularly pick up trash in my neighborhood. It's a lost cause, but after each cleaning the area looks nice, so that's the payoff. I focus on high traffic areas and specific sites and don't worry about the overall picture. Of course, there has to be some infrastructure in place for any cleaning campaign to be a success.
So the proposed alternative solutions in this video, with the exception of the river clean up, are political and social in nature, which is to say they could be implemented tomorrow but probably will take decades and are completly outside of the control of you, me and TeamSeas.
It's like telling me I shouldn't pick up trash from the forest because the problem is way bigger than just a little trash on the surface while also telling me my solution is ineffiecent. Which is both true but instead of offering a viable alternative of what I could do instead you tell me the government should fix the problem, which is true in the long run but also nothing that I can really influence alone, making your argument worthless to me.
That's not the only thing he said. He also explained that Team Seas wasn't using/placing their technology correctly and that they aren't being honest about how revelotunary, effective and omniaplicable their solutions are.
The solutions he proposed are most affective when implemented institutionaly but doing things like river specific solutions and building messures that prevent plastic geting into the rivers are still relatively effective on a NGO/Charatiy and even personal level.
Team Seas could build tech, to prevent Trash getting into water streams or proper garbage dumps in poor communities that currently have ones that leak into the rivers.
But that's less sexy than the less effective futuristic alternative.
Edit: for Grammar
@@LOgomon20 You explained this very well, thank you.
@@LOgomon20 What tech could they build? If you look at the Mark Rober video that was being critiqued (which features the interceptor), he literally goes to the source of the river waste. He talked to leaders on the ground, and they say that because of the way their governments work, they don't have effective options for cleaning their trash. So the average person, not knowing what to do with their waste, throws away, and it ends up in the river.
How could TeamSeas solve THAT issue in any meaningful, reasonable way?
Oh no- I don't want that to be the message you took from this video! here's why I was excited to contribute to this video (an alternative message in 2 sentences): Team Seas is a really big campaign that unfortunately seems to have backed a solution that isn't the best, which is a bummer. I'll be spending my resources on other solutions, including beach cleanups and long-term changes, both of which are The Ocean Conservancy's jam, so I can also donate directly to them instead of Team Seas.
Individual action absolutely matters, not least of all so we can have sustained hope that the long-term solutions are worth pushing for. ❤️
@@heychrisfox Like I said initially a better functioning garbage dump or a machine that intercepts garbage when or before it falls into the stream.
In a video like this, going into detail of some examples of the highly functional methods would be super important in order to get credibility here
It feels like you might have intentionally brushed past this because it might have been hard or not as great of a solution as you say
Right. Feels like there are so many bad-faith arguments in here. A cynic would think they might feel upset that their decades of talking about the problem had little actual effects while some simple idea (i.e. not high tech at all, nor pretending to be) by a high-school kid (Boyan thought up the ocean cleanup as his final high school project) is actually getting something done.
I might be wrong, but this video gives us absolutely nothing on how effective any other method has actually turned out to be.
You keep saying it's best to stop plastic at the source. But I ask you, is it best to try to catch each individual raindrop, or just put a barrel below rain gutter? It's far more efficient to collect plaatic where it is already concentrated. Sure, building out a great sanitation network is a great goal, but it's one that's vastly out of reach for third world countries. But what's not out of reach is collecting the plastic that's already concentrated by the rivers.
Cool, the other people can go after other sources of pollution. Good grief, people will endlessly whine anytime something solves part of a problem
"You didn't fix everything, so why did you even try?"
I enjoyed this video and I generally think your content on environmental science, but I wish you had gone a bit more in depth on specific technologies or soloutions that can or have been implemented in specific scenarios. A lot of the talk surrounding better soloutions was pretty vague, so I feel like I still don't have a good idea of what those solutions are.
which makes the existence of this entire video puzzling to me. If you want to make a video about how cleanup isn't the final solution then fine, but why criticize someone for trying to clean up at all? He didn't even offer an alternative to their method.
I just have to say, at least they're doing something. I don't really like the tone of this video. You know a charity is pretty hamstrung in what they can actually do. It's not like they can go out and tell huge companies what they can do or change people's lifelong habits. Unless we find out they're stealing donations or something like that, I'm all for it.
16:50 You really hit the nail on the head. The general public clearly cares a lot about causes like this, which is why publicity campaigns and greenwashing exist. But the best solution is rarely the most attractive one, and the most attractive solution is always the one that will resonate with people the most. I have a lot of respect for both Mr Beast and Mark Rober, but it's kind of ironic that a campaign fronted by an ex-NASA engineer falls so short on its efficacy due to poor scientific understanding.
I've met both of them and my initial reaction when I heard about Team Seas was something like "they must not know! they both want to do good- they don't fully understand who they've partnered with!" and then uh... well, it was made clear that I was being naive- their campaign staff sure did make different decisions than I would have. so I'm not sure "poor scientific understanding" is how I would phrase what happened here 🫣
@@vgwschutte No need for you to hold your punches.
So I take it they were very arrogant?
@@tams805 no, I don't mean that. To be clear: I never spoke to Mark in any way about this campaign (I met him over lunch years ago at a conference) and Jimmy was super kind in the 1 text message exchange that we had about Team Seas. I talked almost exclusively with campaign staff, thinking they didn't have all the info that science-oriented folks did. And it turns out they totally did, they just decided on a different course of action than I would have if I were rich and famous with that same info.
@@vgwschutteIt's a shame if they had that knowledge. Unlike other charities or groups that have to market the cause to get attention, simply Mr Beast's face attached to the project is enough to get people's attention. I don't understand the need to harm the whole campaign for extra marketing.
to be fair though, he is an engineer, mostly a mechanical engineer. Scientific method there is vastly different than ones in a more "murky" sciences like geology or humanity. He sure can make mechanical assembly and test the heck out of it.
but the same thinking process doesn't translate to drafting an environmental movement policy, what he should do is obviously (as the video said) consult to a few experts, but i do emphasise if it doesn't cross hiss mind, or even if he does, i do understand (but not agree with ) that good publicity is better than no publicity
I don't know. Watched both of your videos. Both of you make a good point but I truly don't think Mark Rober's efforts are futile. The system is messed up. Anyone who does anything to help, even the slightest bit, is on the right track. If everyone out there could simply stop littering (individuals and factories/companies), that is the #1 solution. But, we know how that goes.
Exactly. We could do something or nothing. Sure, we could solve the entire problem, but good luck with that. Changing how an entire planet throws away their garbage or how an entire planet uses plastic is not a reasonable solution, because the problem is way too big to even conceive. Keeping trash from entering the ocean IS sustainable, easy, efficient, and practical; it's just not the best possible solution, because the best possible solution isn't attainable by a tiny charity organization.
Thank you for educating me, I will change my tactics when arguing for ecological initiatives in the future. ^_^ Keep up the great work friend.
Well at least someone is doing something instead of literally nothing
this is as good as literally nothing and actually harmful because it lies about the correct solution
So trueeeeee.
Well in my opinion it's better to remove some of the plastic is better than doing nothing and hoping someone else will do something to clean it up.
You don’t get his point. Look at his pinned comment.
I would wager that a one size fits all interceptor is cheaper than a custom solution for each river.
This was great - don't pull punches too hard though!
This style of influence carries over into everything and its maddening. Recently got a comment that I need to go get with it and start being properly green-minded by getting an EV when I only drive my 20 year old tiny car I keep fixing up about 15 miles per month (if even that) because I bike literally everywhere. Meanwhile they're on their 3rd car in 7 years - because more EV's is more green, right?! /s
Nothing's wrong or nothing's right. World's a weird place
consumerism is a plague, and car makers surely like money
this is the entire reason why I'm on TikTok- trying to keep the focus on long-term solutions is hard and requires support!! not guilt or detailed transgression counting ❤️
Because second-hand cars don't exist.
@@alalalala57 These weren't second-hand cars, and even if they were they'd still be contributing a ton more emissions than my biking and extremely rare car trip.
The fact that the interceptor is doing anything is more than most are doing. Overly critical video, no this is not an end all be all solution and I absolutely respect that position. We are not at the point in our progress to make misleading thumb nails and titles to shoot down a relatively small clean up project in comparison to the positivity it does have
As an IT-specialist I love new technology as much as anyone, but a lot of people on the internet are so impressed by fancy new technology, that they forget to ask whether that's actually needed to solve the problem or even if the alleged problem even needed a solution at all.
IoT stuff is the best example, where a lot of products require microchips and online connectivity for something that could've been achieved by purely analogue electric or even mechanical systems.
Home appliances are another one: Why does a whole range of toasters with microprocessors, LC-Displays and various toasting programs exist, when a simple model that appart from the case just consist of a spring, an electromagnet, some high resistance wire and a potentiometer achieves the same darn thing?
I get that it's fun to marvel at the ingenuity of making a highly complex technical system work smoothly, but that shouldn't make one forget that the simpler you can make the solution to a problem, the better, cheaper and more reliable it usually will be!
You can't really show off a $10 toaster to your friends though
We need to start pushing companies to be financially responsible for the waste they generate and for all negative externalities in general. Recycling fees, taxes on production, make them pay for cleanup, etc.
Yeah. Who do you think is gonna pay for that? 😀
@@LifeOnHoth the companies will pay for it, increasing prices correspondingly. This will drive them to improve their processes to be more environmentally friendly to remain competitive while also nudging customers towards more sustainable products and services. Win-win all around
I have question, I agree that looking at the issue in retrospect you can clearly spend this money better based on the evidence presented in this video.
However I feel you may underrate the importance of marketing in this process. While the actual, in practice best solutions may not be so flamboyant they are simply worse from a marketing perspective and would have very likely generated less total money to work with against the problem.
It may be depressing to see that we do need to market the research, but at the end of the day we need to make sure its practical, and marketing is a critical part in rallying the public behind respective solutions.
What we need is marketing of more effective solutions.
@@simonfinnie2900 That "spectacle" is essentially marketing though. Regardless of Mr Beasts involvement that feeling of spectacle is very successful marketing.
@@simonfinnie2900 Yeah, maybe there would have been a better way to do it and still have just as much of a spectacle I agree. I wonder if there are any particular reasons why not, or if such a thing was even considered. It would be interesting if there is ever a response but I don't know if that will happen.
@@morton_hacks This is possibly the greatest hope I have for the Ocean Cleanup project, that they eventually get enough money and cultural capital that they can start to influence the companies and governments that have the power to fix the problem at the source. Of course, that also relies on them also deciding to wield that influence, because when they do it will dry up their funding source. There is a lot of money in superficially pretending to solve a problem while never actually solving it.
@@Ladadadada 100%, also superficially fixing a problem is a big issue, such as the current issue with gas replacing coal a slight but little difference in emissions. And then fossil fuel power plants are marketed as falling with data sources failing to include gas.
I do not think that this is what Mr Beast and Mark Rober are doing though. I would like to take the benefit of doubt here and suggest that it may have simply been the best way to make the most money and some of these other options were considered in the process.
It's pretty easy to criticize TeamSeas as a surface level solution, but I'd argue that the action and visual awareness of TeamSeas does more for environmental change than critique
That's pretty speculative. TeamSeas marketing could lead to complacency if they oversell the idea that this will be solved by technology so no one needs to change their own consumption/recycling habits. This kind of critique gives you a better understanding of where you should focus your efforts if you care about fixing the problem instead of selling the dream that you don't have to do anything and things will be fixed by an NPO with futuristic looking boats.
Couldn't agree more. Letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. Whilst I'm glad these videos exist to bring about a bit of realism to the hype, Team Seas shone a light on an issue and got people excited about Ocean Cleanup in a way they just couldn't if donations solely went to Ocean Conservancy. So it was probably a good mix to split donations between both charities.
Or it could become like recycling that allows people that aren't following too closely to think that the issue is being addressed. The only solution is to tax the companies that are producing and using the plastics to cover at least some portion of the cost of cleanup and prevention.
Let me recap this whole video:
1. Ocean cleanup doesnt work as well as you think (totally fair)
2. There are other solutions
3. Doesnt state any realistic alternative solutions
4. Look how smart i am for making you listen to me for 20 minutes without saying anything of real substance.
5.I can seem greater than all these organizations that are at least making an effort to positively impact the world by pointing out their flaws, meanwhile, ill just say "systematic change" is the solution to the problem.
"Systematic change" is technically the solution to most problems that exist, but until Coca Cola stops profiting off plastic bottles (never) and 3rd world governments have the finances and luxury to focus on issues such as waste management infrastructure, we as a society will be reduced to identifying solutions we can actually control. So kudos to Ocean Cleanup for at least making an attempt.
Systematic change also comes from projects like this, that gathers the whole world to clean up plastics. When everyone is aware of the damages plastic causes the environment, politics are pushed to please their voters, and systematic change is encouraged to happen. Some scientists really struggle to get their head out of their ass. And are upset that people are willing to go and clean up trash, instead of giving them money.
wait up, i think what really needs to be said, is that ocean clean up are at least actually doing something. In my eyes taking trash out of the water is only a good thing. To criticise saying, oh this is futile etc seems silly as let's face it they still doing an amazing thing for the world. It could maybe do it better, sure! but also doing SOMETHING hopefully will inspire more to join and think of better more affective solutions!
All the criticism I see of Ocean Cleanup is like this, where it criticizes the efficiency and says it's not enough. But they are at least doing something, compared to all their critics that just want to keep arguing for an eternity while the oceans die.
One thing I like about the ocean cleanup is that they made headlines (just like most of the other organisations) but just like you said, they look cool. A bunch of young people see this and they start reading about it. This is where they start thinking about their own inventions and solutions, because they also want to 'make a difference' and build cool things that help the planet.
So I think it's about the "image" it creates. If they can invent something cool, that helps the planet, then I can too.
When the title said "didn't work" I was kinda expecting this thing catches NOTHING!!! Turns out can't just depend on "one neat trick"? Okay fine develop more solutions. I'm fine with having multiple solutions covering each other's weak points.
You were right all along
Not surprised by the amount of people in the comments who either didn't watch the video or didn't pay attention.
As you've said, the problem is not the TeamSeas initative it's that they have so much potential and are squandering it while taking so much attention away from the places that actually need support and could be having more impact.
Great video as always, keep it up!
An attractive thing about the interceptor as a concept I think is that it seems possible. Yes, it's "easy" but I think it's more than just people being lazy.
When the problem is systematic and worldwide it feels so hopeless.
Picking up trash and recycling is good but it still end up in nature, and trying to fix systematic things in one country is hard enough but when it's multiple countries and companies all over the world it feels impossible.
Even if I, as an individual, do the stuff (recycle, use less plastic, protest, vote, ect), all those things, even if that's what's needed, FEELS like a blip at most. People have already been recycling/voting/ect and trying to fix things for a long time and stuff's still bad. But "buying a boat" (at least controbuting to one) FEELS like it's something doable that actually makes a difference, even if it doesn't..
Here is an interceptor in use in California. ua-cam.com/video/BpYvhMinQoU/v-deo.html&ab_channel=TheOceanCleanup
this video right here is why comprehensive enviromental action will never get done. As soon as someone start trying to implement as solution people rip into it for not being big enough or not accounting for this or that. The truth is that to save the enviroment and the climat thousands if not hundreds of thousands of solutions will have to be implemented, and with that many things needing to happen it is really easy to argue over what is most important or what is best, but at the end of the day they all must be done and at the end of the day you must just start doing and let the momentum carry us towards the goal. This video comes across as someone who is upset that people are going with a solution that isnt theirs and decides to complain about it instead of congratualating and getting on with what needs to be done.
9:20 No. The trashwheels, there are two, are near the end of their respective streams, but they are instream systems. The trashwheels work because their booms collect the floating debris of a single stream that goes in one direction. They aren't in the harbor where currents sweep things together like the pacific garbage patch. It is very much like the interceptor, and has been quite effective at reducing trash in the harbor. Would Dr. Schutte be less critical of the interceptor if they placed it right before the delta, which effectively is what the trashwheels are doing? I think not.
YES I would be less critical of the interceptor if they used science/evidence to inform their decisions (like where the interceptor should go, and Mr Trash Wheel has a great, publicly available reporting system!), but The Ocean Cleanup has a history of doing science in-house that they don't show to people outside the org, and then attacking scientists who use evidence available to all to critique their systems. So a huge part of WHY I'm critical is BECAUSE The Ocean Cleanup's past behavior indicates that they are not willing to engage with scientific evidence on what works, but they are willing to destroy wildlife/habitat in order to scoop trash.
I agree with you in the sentences that cleaning up the rivers isn't the best solution and we should stop the plastic to enter the water in the first place
But I don't agree with you in the point of green washing companies just because a big company is bad for the environment if they use their money to finance a project for the future it is still good
And the point at 11:30 just because there are now better solution doesn't need new inventions because if there is no "competition" nothing will change
Because with newer tech we might clean the ocean by 2035 and not 5 years later
the point is this tech WONT clean up the ocean. It's might make it all look better but it's like sweeping your toys under the bed the rooms still a mess you just made it look nicer. There's still the trash under the surface and still trash all over the banks and in the sediment. All the plastic is breaking down and making it's way into the environment is sizes to small for an interceptor to do anything about.
This is a true point but you have to start somewhere and if the ocean is once clean it is easier to maintain
@@Tasmantor Yeah they should just stop trying /s
I see one group actually doing something to help solve the problem, another person "trash-talking" it and saying the solution is "science", unfortunately, this is more common than not
what team seas is doing is throwing one drop of water on a fire at a time...sure they're doing *something*, but as scientists are saying, useless and missing the point
what we should do is reduce the amount of plastic waste in the first place, with good waste management, reduced plastic usage overall and better regulation for protecting our rivers and oceans.
there are an estimated 300 billion pounds of plastic in the ocean, removing 30 million pounds is laughably miniscule.
@@Avx829 The point is that the interceptor can't clean up the oceans by itself, having a thousand or a million won't change that fact: it only helps against a very specific problem of plastic swimming on the surface of a river. An interceptor on every river still won't fish out all the plastic.
You're underestimating what has been done so far, climate regulation has not only been passed as laws, but also does work. The most famous case was worldwide regulation saving the ozone layer.
As regarding legislation specific to plastic in the ocean: many countries do quite successfully keep their rivers clean, and some regions also are starting to try reducing plastic usage.
Don't give in to climate doomerism, there is hope! We still have a long way to go, but it's only impossible to solve it if we stop trying.
@@Avx829 I'm not saying their completely useless, but on the scale we're talking here such a technical solution doesnt work in relevant numbers. Plastic pollution is a deeply complex systemic issue, machines like these simply can't sustainably scale to meet the requirements.
It's similar to current attempts at carbon capture: it works well on small scale for certain systems, but it's not sustainable to deploy to solve climate change as a whole.
That's why people take issue with this project being used as the flagship for team seas: it's not that the project itself is bad, but in that it's such small legobrick in the "grand solution" to ocean pollution. It's misleading for the general public as to what our primary focus ought to be: which should be environmentally friendly politics.
@@Avx829 I think you misunderstood my point about scaleability; a thousand intereceptors are not a thousand times as effective, the systems we are dealing with are much more complex than that. As discussed in this video, plastic does not just float down on the surface of a river, there are a myriad of ways it lands in the ocean, and there are a myriad of places besides oceans where it is a danger to the environment. Filtering out microplastic is an incredibly difficult task that will depend heavily on the environment.
Nets in the ocean have their own issues, they can only be effectively used in certain situations, wrongly applied they can seriously harm the wildlife.
This is not a videogame where you can build some machine that magically filters out 10% of all plastic per squaremeter of water covered.
In reality every environment is different, there are different types of plastic, different ways they are harmful, different ecosystems one has to be careful not to destroy by cleaning out plastic.
I'm not saying the cleanup is useless, it does filter out plastic, which is great. But it's not a solution that will solve the problem, it's one small step among a million others that have to be taken.
It's understandable why these interceptors seem so attractive to many people: it's a simple understandable solution that on the surface seems to work great, it's just the reality is as always much more complicated.
Also: climate regulation absolutely is a form of action: reducing the overall plastic produced certainly will have an effect, and it's one that with relatively little resources used strikes at the heart of the problem.
When your boat has a leak, the most important step is to plug the hole, else you'll be pumping out water for a long time.
So what you seem to be saying is that it's better to carry on doing what we've been doing for the past few decades in the hope that it might work one day. The Ocean Cleanup Project is attacking the problem from the POV of what we can do as individuals who don't have access to politicians who can force cures at source. They've never claimed that their technology is new or particularly sexy - it's the very ordinariness of it that makes it so useful. They've also stressed that each river needs its own solution, but you drone on about how they're a one-solution-fits-all outfit.
Don't let perfect get in the way of good, though.
I think the most important detail (which isn't mentioned until 14:50) is simply "stop the production of single-use plastics. That's everything from plastic grocery bags, disposable cutlery, and packaging, to drink bottles/packets (sorry capri-sun), to things like ketchup and barbeque individual use packets.
Unfortunately, plastic simply does not get recycled, pretty much anywhere, what was "being recycled" was really being dumped in China and the Philippines until they stopped accepting it (and were likely burning it, not recycling it.) So that leads me to believe we have to make some hard choices:
1) literately regulate plastic, either by requiring a refundable deposit, or imposing a levy on all plastic products. If it's too expensive to recycle, then it should not be made. Period. Go back to glass or metal bottles, at least those can both be reused and recycled. Unlike plastic (which photo-degrades, unlike metal, and leeches plasticizers into the food, unlike glass)
2) lean on other unsustainable services (eg uber-eats) to produce coolers and cutlery/dishes for their drivers, that the food, drinks and condiments can be delivered in, and then taken back to be cleaned. Then in turn lean on the restaurants to adopt these as their standard food packaging so they can be first reused, and later recycled if damaged. There is no reason McDonalds, Burger King and Wendys can not use the same "burger-saver" cooler.
Right now, the amount of over-packaging from food couriers is absolutely ridiculous and is increasing the amount of garbage and plastic waste, rather than reducing it by getting less people to drive long distances for a meal.
There is so much over-packaging in food, that it would not surprise me to discover that a lot of plastic trash in rivers is directly from beverage containers and "prepackaged" foods.
This channel: "TheOceanCleanup doesnt customize their solutions"
Also this channel: * Only offers solutions right at the source * (plastic already in the ocean can rot there)
No, trying to clean up plastic in the ocean without stopping it at the source is like the little dutch boy sticking his finger into the dike. You have to target plastics at their source, otherwise, you are just wasting money picking up plastics that will be back in the ocean by tomorrow.
@@andreicecold4379 how do you do that with a budget of 32million?
@@ssghostleviathan9820build infrastructure
@@alexanderl.6207You’re not going to build much with that.
As I see the problem is really about getting people attention to the problem, and for this Ocean Cleanup is indeed a great solution.
It does a poor job of actually cleanup, but as you said yourself, it makes into the headlines.
So if half of the TeamSeas donations goes to the Ocean Conservancy, I believe that the Ocean Cleanup is worth it if brings double the donations it would without it.
So I don't think blaming TeamSeas here is really fair, and splitting the donations indicates that they knew about the Ocean Cleanup effectiveness, but thought it was the best compromise to grab attention.
Maybe the clickbaity title "Why TeamSeas Doesn't Work" is a bit harsh. Sure, is a nice way to bring and point people to the right solutions, but it ain't actively bringing more contributions (monetary) that converts to solving the problem itself.
"Cleaning others mess isn't good enough, you can just try to convince others not to make a mess in the first place, even if it wont lead anywhere" Oh sweet summer child...
Great video. The problem is that even though we have a very high degree of plastic seperation in our waste stream in Denmark we export up to 85% of the plastic. It is unknown where the plastic ends up. I have seen videos indicating it is exported to e.g. Germany which exports it to some east Asian country where it often times is dumped in landfills or directly in rivers.