Shadowing Practice: The Truth About Ocean Plastic - Learn English Speaking with Video
Creating lesson...
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I was a teenager on a cruise when I first saw ocean pollution up close.
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Late at night I heard noise over the railing.
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I looked down and saw a crew dumping garbage into the ocean.
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A stream of trash stretching off towards the horizon.
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That image stuck with me.
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But that garbage spilling into the ocean was just the tip of the trashberg.
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And that trashberg is mainly plastic.
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Plastic makes up about 80% of marine pollution.
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It doesn't always come from where you'd expect.
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Most people think of waste plastics as straws, bottles and grocery bags that are washing off of beaches.
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But when a Dutch non-profit called the Ocean Cleanup sailed out to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch to scoop it all up, they found something else entirely.
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More than three quarters of the plastic wasn't consumer trash at all.
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It didn't even come from the shore.
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Even worse, cleaning it up was a lot harder than anyone hoped.
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So they did something surprising.
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They turned around, returned to shore and started tackling the plastic problem upstream.
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This is the story of what the ocean cleanup discovered once they started studying the problem up close, and why solving ocean plastic might mean turning off the tap and not just mopping up what's already spilled.
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I'm Matt Farrell, welcome to Undecided.
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This video is brought to you by Surfshark.
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Not all ocean plastic ends up on a beach.
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Some sinks and some drifts, pulled by currents into giant, slowly spinning vortexes in every ocean basin.
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The largest is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch between Hawaii and California.
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It covers an area twice the size of Texas or three times the size of France.
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It contains roughly 80,000 metric tons of floating plastic.
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That's about 1.8 trillion pieces.
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Newspapers and television crews painted a picture of an island of floating bottles
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and other household trash blown in from litter and open landfills.
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However, the Dutch non-profit The Ocean Cleanup found something completely different when they sailed there.
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The biggest surprise?
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It wasn't just bottles and bags from land.
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More than 75% of it was debris from the fishing industry.
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It wasn't cruise ships dumping trash, it was an entire industry losing its equipment at sea.
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Almost half of it is ghost nets and ropes that are abandoned or lost at sea.
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This gear keeps fishing when the fishermen have gone home.
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It entangles turtles, sharks, even whales.
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Much of the rest of the plastic is fishing gear like floats and crates.
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What makes plastic such a problem is that it doesn't go away on its own.
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Over time, this plastic breaks into smaller pieces that end up in the stomachs of seabirds and fish.
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Eventually, it fragments into microplastics that are impossible to recover.
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The fishing gear is stranded in the middle of the ocean, far from the countries that dumped it and left.
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The ocean cleanup began trialing different cleanup systems at sea in 2018, hoping to clean up the fishing gear.
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But they faced major challenges immediately.
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There's a huge amount of plastic there, but it's dispersed over a large area.
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So it seems like something, it's there, you just scoop it up and bring it back, but actually it's constantly moving.
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It's a very difficult environment.
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The open ocean is far from shore." That's Hank Von Dahlen, the nonprofit's VP of Science and Technology.
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First, the organization tried using a passive system
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that let ocean currents do all the work to gather up plastic in a huge net.
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But the ocean was not on board.
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The net just drifted with the plastic and then part of it broke.
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After three generations of designs, the organization settled in a system where two ships tow a giant net between them.
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The net stretches 2.2 kilometers, roughly a mile and a third.
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And it works!
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In just one trash haul, the ocean cleanup can land as much as 11 tons or 25,000 pounds of trash.
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But this approach comes with a catch.
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The garbage patch is still an ecosystem.
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Dragging a huge net catches not only plastic, but sea life, also known as bycatch.
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The ocean cleanup has been transparent about the animals caught from sharks, turtles, and fish to tiny drifting creatures that live in the ocean's surface.
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They've also modified the design of their nets to reduce their impact.
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Their latest system uses a bigger mesh to let creatures pass through, plus escape hatches and underwater cameras to spot turtles.
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The Ocean Cleanup says about 99.9% of what it captures is plastic, with roughly 0.1% as bycatch.
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That's not nothing, especially when it involves protected species like turtles.
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But there's another approach to cleaning up ocean plastic, and one that avoids fishing for plastic with a net.
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Before I get into that, there's another piece of tech that helps with a different kind of net, the internet.
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Things like names, emails, phone numbers and more.
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Don't miss out on this great deal.
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The link's in the description below and thanks to Surfshark and to all of you for supporting the channel.
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So back to that other approach.
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A California nonprofit called Ocean Voyages Institute asked recreational sailors crossing the Pacific to tag ghost nets with GPS trackers.
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When those nets gathered in the same area, a wind-powered cargo ship headed out and collected them by hand.
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Over 10 trips they removed 362 metric tons of debris.
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However, there are plastic hotspots that we don't need GPS trackers to find.
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Places where trash flows right through the net.
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It's rivers.
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The cruise I took as a kid, the ship probably sailed right past rivers carrying more plastic than any garbage bag I saw go overboard.
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Trash ends up in rivers when wind and storm runoff carry it into the water.
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Most of it washes up along coastlines or floats nearby.
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This is a whole different and bigger trashberg than what's floating in the ocean vortexes like the patch.
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Here's the surprising part and it kind of blew my mind.
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The ocean cleanup found that of the more than 100,000 rivers around the world, just 1,000 or so carry about 80% of the plastic reaching the ocean.
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There's a thousand rivers, but actually if we look a step closer, we can identify 200 cities
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which are responsible for most of this outflow." The organization is
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setting its sights on the roughly 1 to 3 million metric
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tons of plastic it estimates flows into the oceans from rivers each year.
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That's the equivalent of about 600 dump trucks of trash every single day.
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But exactly how will this work and where?
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These are urban rivers, many of them in Asia.
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The people living along them typically generate less trash per person than Americans or Europeans.
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Part of the problem is that the garbage collection and properly lined landfills cost money, and a lot of rapidly growing cities simply don't have these systems in place.
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So trash ends up on the ground, and the ground leads to the river.
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The organization plans to tackle the 1,000 most polluting rivers, working with local governments and communities and adapting the tech to each location.
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They have a whole system, and they call it the Interceptor.
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It does what it says on the label, it intercepts trash before it hits the ocean.
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The Interceptor comes in a couple different flavors, each suited to its local conditions.
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The original model lets local boat traffic keep flowing in places like the Dominican Republic.
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But trash is funneled by a long barrier towards a conveyor belt
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that lifts debris out of the water and dumps it into the collection barge.
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When it's full, it techs local operators for pickup because, even though it's voracious, the Interceptor still has manners.
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The Ocean Cleanup has a different approach for places like Rio Las Vacas outside of Guatemala City, where seasonal rains send tsunamis of trash rushing down the river.
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It's called the Interceptor Barricade.
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It's a tall floating barrier designed to hold back massive surges of debris.
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In its first year anchored to the riverbanks of the Rio Las Facas, it prevented more than 10,000 metric tons of trash from entering the Caribbean.
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10,000 metric tons.
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Compare that to the 500 tons collected at sea.
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It's no wonder the ocean cleanup turned their efforts upstream.
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But to me, operating within countries seems a lot more complicated than working at sea.
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I asked Hank how they navigate that.
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Before we go to a country, we want to understand what is the environment, what are the communities.
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If we deploy an interceptor in a certain area, who's affected by that?
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How can we make sure that this works for them?
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Maybe there's local employment can be gained.
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The organization doesn't guesstimate the location and build of each interceptor.
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It optimizes it after extensive surveys.
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That means placing cameras along rivers to track plastic with AI, flying drones to map debris hotspots and sending GPS trackers downstream to see how trash moves.
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In Mumbai, India, the Ocean Cleanup found that 80% of the plastic comes from just 30% of the rivers.
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That's allowed the organization to target their interceptors for maximum payoff.
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Stopping the plastic upstream doesn't remove the debris already tangled in riversides, mangroves, and beaches.
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So alongside its interceptors, the Ocean Cleanup works with local partners to remove that legacy plastic.
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Today, interceptors are operating in rivers across more than a dozen locations from Guatemala and Jamaica to Malaysia and Vietnam.
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Together, the Ocean Cleanup says that these pilot projects are already preventing 2-5% of the river plastic from hitting the ocean.
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It's not just the sea that's seeing the benefits.
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Like local fishermen, they see the health of their rivers increase.
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People that live near the river actually, you know, they can swim in the river again.
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The next step is scaling up.
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The organization plans to roll out interceptors in 30 cities, which it says could cut the global flow of plastic into
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the ocean by as much as one-third by the end of the decade.
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Next up is Panama City, the one in Panama, and then Mumbai.
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So the plastic problem is solved, right?
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Not exactly.
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Pulling plastic out of the water doesn't make it just disappear.
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It just moves the problem back onto land where we already struggled to to recycle it.
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But I recently covered how that's starting to change.
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Where local infrastructure exists, some river plastic is put to use.
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PET bottles get recycled, organic waste gets composted, the rest goes into landfills or incinerators.
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Also, river cleanup doesn't touch the plastic that's already out there, circling in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
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Most of it came from fishing boats, so there's no river to trace it back to.
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But given how much easier and cheaper it is to catch trash in rivers than out in the open ocean, I asked Hank, why focus on cleaning up the Great Garbage Patch at all?
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If you have a bathtub which is overflowing, you can close the tap, but you still need to mop the floor, empty the bath and do all that stuff.
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For me personally, I'm all in on mopping up the plastic in the patch.
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We have to do it in a way that benefits the ecosystem out there.
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We don't want to make the situation worse.
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The ocean cleanup is weighing the cost of its plastic removal against the cost of just leaving it there.
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Their own environmental assessment put it bluntly.
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Cleanup operations hurt some marine populations in the short term, but leaving plastic in the ocean lets it break into microplastics that could do more damage in the long run.
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It's a difficult balance.
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The ocean cleanup has been collecting data in the Great Pacific
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Garbage Patch long enough to clock a serious rise in plastic fragments.
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Five-fold in just seven years.
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The organization says that by volume, there is now much more plastic in the patch than fish in other critters.
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The problem is accelerating.
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And yet the Ocean Cleanup has hit pause on, well, Ocean Cleanup.
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But in a way that makes sense.
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Recovering plastic at this scale is expensive.
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So the organization has shifted its focus to learning how to do it more efficiently.
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What we saw with Ocean Voyages Institute's GPS tracking approach is
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that knowing the exact location of the plastic is the biggest part of the battle.
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In 2025, the Ocean Cleanup asked sailors in the Trans-Pacific Yacht Race to tag ghost nets
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and deployed another 144 trackers in a remote region of the patch.
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These trackers pinged satellites over months, helping model how plastic moves and clumps together.
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The organization is also mounting cameras on cargo ships which use AI to detect and photograph plastic recording its GPS location.
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But to pinpoint plastic more precisely, the ocean cleanup is betting on drones.
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We actually get more accuracy in there being out there in the patch itself, flying with drones, getting more information about where these hotspots are.
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The idea is that better data leads to smarter cleanup.
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The organization says this new approach could drop the cost and timeline for cleanup nearly in half.
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And I do hope that in five to 10 years time, the Ocean Cleanup no longer exists.
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We've achieved our mission and everybody says, wow, I never thought that would happen, but we all proved them wrong.
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That would be amazing.
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But cleaning up the plastic that's already in the patch won't stop fishing gear from being lost next year, or plastic continuing to wash into rivers.
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Without fixing how much plastic we make and how it's handled, Ocean Cleanup becomes maintenance, like an annual beach cleanup.
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And that means more cost and more disruption to the ecosystem.
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The UN has been negotiating a global plastics treaty since 2022, but talks have stalled over whether they're focused on the waste management or cut production itself.
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For now, the treaty is dead in the water, along with a lot of plastic.
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But many nations and groups, including the ocean cleanup, are still pushing to make it happen.
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We are part of lobby groups there.
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We bundle our strengths.
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And I think what the ocean cleanup brings to the table is a lot of data showing actually the problem itself.
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And we're also showing that there are solutions available to do this.
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Here's where I land on this.
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Cleaning up the ocean is worth doing.
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Intercepting plastic in rivers is worth doing.
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We've got to mop that plastic up.
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But for now, the tap is still open.
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As hard as it is to clean up plastic at sea, turning off the tap to new plastics may be the biggest challenge of all.
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It all comes down to money, policy, and whether we're willing to change how we make and use this stuff in the first place.
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And right now, global plastic production is still growing.
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But here's what sticks with me.
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I saw a cruise ship's crew dumping bags of trash, but the real problem was always bigger than that moment.
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And so are the solutions.
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In El Catalito, Guatemala, the organic waste pulled from the Rio Las Vacas gets composted.
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In the wood, it goes to nearby communities hit by deforestation.
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Families use it for cooking fuel.
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Trash from a river literally keeping people warm.
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That's not going to solve the plastic crisis, but it shows that even partial solutions still help, especially for people living closest the problem.
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But what do you think?
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Do you think capturing plastics from rivers is a good solution?
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Jump in the comments and let me know.
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You can also check out my extended cuts of many of my videos, like this one, over on Patreon.
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And a big welcome to News Supporter Plus member P.
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Bernstadt.
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If human-written and research videos matter to you, Patreon helps a ton.
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I'll link this in the description if you'd like to join, but still just watching, subscribing, and turning on notifications is awesome.
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And check out my follow-up podcast, Still to be Determined, while we keep this conversation going.
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Keep your mind open, stay curious.
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I'll see you in the next one.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This B2 speaking lesson is built on the video “The Truth About Ocean Plastic”. The speaker keeps coming back to these words: plastic, ocean, cleanup, river, trash. This video has 218 sentences and 2880 words to shadow. The speech runs for 14:49. The speaker talks fast, about 194 words per minute, so expect linked and reduced sounds. Only 78% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English, so the vocabulary is demanding.
Key vocabulary in this video
The 15 most advanced words in the video, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| patch noun | /pæt͡ʃ/ | A piece of cloth, or other suitable material, sewed or otherwise fixed upon a garment to repair or strengthen it, especially upon an old garment to cover a… |
| interceptor noun | /ˈɪn.təɹˌsɛp.təɹ/ | Anyone or anything that intercepts something else. |
| garbage noun | /ˈɡɑɹ.bɪd͡ʒ/ | Food waste material of any kind. |
| debris noun | /ˈdɛbɹi/ | Rubble, wreckage, scattered remains of something destroyed. |
| float verb | /fləʊt/ | To be supported by a fluid of greater density (than the object). |
| tracker noun | /ˈtɹækə(ɹ)/ | A person employed to follow and monitor a political rival. |
| metric adjective | /ˈmɛt.ɹɪk/ | Of or relating to the metric system of measurement. |
| dump verb | /dʌmp/ | To release, especially in large quantities and chaotic manner. |
| turtle noun | /ˈtɝtl̩/ | Any land, aquatic, or semi-aquatic reptile of the order Testudines, characterised by a protective shell enclosing its body. See also tortoise. |
| landfill noun | /ˈlæn(d).fɪl/ | A site at which refuse is buried under layers of earth. |
| undecided adjective | /ˌʌndɪˈsaɪ̯.dɪd/ | Open and not yet settled or determined. |
| upstream adjective | /ʌpˈstɹiːm/ | In a direction against the flow of a current or stream of fluid (typically water); upriver. |
| ecosystem noun | /ˈikoʊˌsɪstəm/ | A system formed by an ecological community and its environment that functions as a unit. |
| drone noun | /dɹoʊn/ | A male hymenopteran (ant, bee, hornet, or wasp), whose sole primary function is to mate with the queen. |
| sail noun | /seɪl/ | A piece of fabric attached to a boat and arranged such that it causes the wind to drive the boat along. The sail may be attached to the boat via a combination… |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Meaning |
|---|---|
| clean up verb | To make an area or a thing clean; to pick up a mess; to tidy. |
| check out verb | To record the departure or withdrawal of someone or something (such as guests, employees, books, etc.). |
| turn off verb | To power down, to switch off, to put out of operation, to deactivate (an appliance, light, mechanism, functionality etc.). |
| come down to verb | To reach by moving down or reducing. |
| follow up verb | To take further actions remaining after an event; to continue, revisit, or persist; especially, to maintain communication or verify. |
| head out verb | To leave, depart; to go on ahead. |
| hold back verb | To act with reserve; to contain one's full measure or power. |
| look down verb | To lower one's eyes; to direct one's look downwards. |
Sentences worth repeating
Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:
- It doesn't always come from where you'd expect.
- How can we make sure that this works for them?
- We don't want to make the situation worse.
- Here's where I land on this.
- We've got to mop that plastic up.
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Present perfect continuous have/has been + -ing — an action that started earlier and is still going on | I've been using · has been collecting · has been negotiating |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | is brought · are abandoned · is stranded |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | have gone · has been · They've also modified |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 30 contractions and reduced forms, such as doesn't, don't, wasn't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: fisherman /ˈfɪʃ.ɚ.mən/, pollution /pəˈluʃən/, negotiate /nəˈɡəʊ.ʃi.eɪt/, suspicious /səˈspɪʃ.əs/, partial /ˈpɑɹʃəl/
- Long words — get the stress right: interceptor /ˈɪn.təɹˌsɛp.təɹ/, undecided /ˌʌndɪˈsaɪ̯.dɪd/, ecosystem /ˈikoʊˌsɪstəm/, underwater /ʌndɚˈwɔtəɹ/, negotiate /nəˈɡəʊ.ʃi.eɪt/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like patch, interceptor, garbage.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.