Boyan Slat's Ocean Cleanup: Does Reliance On Technology Increase Plastic Pollution?

It is human nature to seek easy answers to complicated problems.

Technology is often relied upon to provide solutions that otherwise cannot be found.

When it comes to plastic pollution, does the reliance on technology come at the expense of less expensive, more effective interventions?

Most plastic pollution can only be removed from the environment by manual labor. Only manual labor, not technology, can effectively remove plastic pollution from river banks, coasts, and most land areas. Only manual labor, not technology, can effectively remove plastic pollution from mangroves, rocky coastlines, coastal forests, forests in general, urban areas, and pretty much everywhere else except deep waters and a few other locations.

In the developing world, there are high levels of poverty. Few can afford to be volunteers. If only some of the tens of millions of dollars that goes towards organizations offering technological solutions went instead towards employing disadvantaged people paid fair wages to remove plastic pollution, far more plastic trash would be recovered.

Recent news reports state that Boyan Slat's river devices will remove 110,000 pounds of plastic from some of the world's most polluted rivers. Every single day millions of pounds of new plastic trash  enters rivers and oceans. Imagine if there is an employed work force providing the necessary manual labor to remove plastic trash from the environment. Not only would this lift people out of poverty, but the amount of plastic they recover would far exceed what river and ocean devices recover. 110,000 pounds of plastic is not much considering the millions of pounds of new plastic trash entering oceans and rivers daily.  Every single day that there is no serious employment program to remove plastic waste from the environment means millions of pounds of plastic that could be recovered in a single day never will be.

River devices and other forms of technology are tools in the fight against plastic pollution.

But when tools become crutches preventing the use of more effective interventions, then they do more harm than good.