Blog edited July 2019 to correct error.
The NOAA Marine Debris Program is looking ahead to the next five years and wants to know what you think!
In October 2015, the NOAA Marine Debris Program (MDP) released a five-year strategic plan to guide our efforts through 2020. The plan’s five overarching goals are coordination, emergency response and preparedness, removal, prevention, and research and assessment. As we enter into the final year of the current plan, we are reflecting on the goals we were able to accomplish and identifying our priorities moving forward.
In the first three years of the plan (Fiscal Years 2016-2018), the MDP has seen the removal of more than 10,000 metric tons of debris through work with more than 450 partner organizations. Thanks, in part, to 23 prevention projects, our team and partners have reached over 81,000 students and 750 teachers, passing on proactive solutions to the next generation. Research projects uncovered new information about microplastic impacts on commercially important seafood species, new Marine Debris Emergency Response Guides assist states in preparing for and responding to natural disasters, and state or regional Marine Debris Action Plans provide a strategic framework for partners across a specific state or region to address the problem of marine debris.
You can access our current strategic plan on our website and comments will be accepted until August 16, 2019. To provide comments via email, please send your thoughts to strategic.marinedebris@noaa.gov, and include your comments in the body of the email or as attachments. Comments may also be provided by mail to the following address:
NOAA Marine Debris Program
1305 East West Highway
SSMC4, Rm 10204
Silver Spring, MD 20910
There's so much BS to sift through, and people are looking for the truth. How about an ask a scientists forum?
How can we subsidize fisherman's incomes to fish out marine debris from the ocean while improving their own fisheries health?
How about taking this marine debris and converting it to gasoline or roads (but this gasoline burns more clean than raw crude and the technology already exists)? You see, to combat Marine Debris, you need to make the debris into some sort of resource. Only then will it every be exploited to the point of a negative impact to the environment and some sort of mass production will take place.
There might be new technologies out there to combat Marine Debris across the globe, you might not have heard of. In a FB page called "Discover 4Ocean", they share these ideas, daily.
There is a lot of work to be done to endorse commercial entities that are doing the same thing you are. Many commercial entities are popping up to combat Marine Debris. 4Ocean is one. They would actually like to partner with NOAA. In fact, they have a new Marine Debris ship, comparable in operations to the NOAA Ship Oscar Sette. Teaming up with commercial entities is really needed.