Various initiatives have been created to remove plastic waste that soils the oceans. The financing of some of them is also, for actors in the petrochemical sector, a way to make them forget their participation in this pollution, while they oppose the creation of a legally binding international instrument, underlines, in a forum in the « World », the consultant Pierre-Maël Defontaines.
when summer comes to an end, the same observation is necessary for those who have chosen the seaside for their holidays: too much waste is still littering our beaches. Packaging, cotton swabs or cigarette butts, plastic waste is the bulk of this pollution that pollutes our coasts. However, this visible pollution is only the part of the iceberg: the essentials spills in a much more massive and much less visible way, offshore.
Globally, the figures are dizzying: according to the European Parliament’s research service, the total amount of plastic present in the oceans now exceeds 150 million tons. The damage caused by this pollution is multiple: the plastic present in the oceans first affects marine biodiversity by phenomena of ingestion, tangling and exposure to toxic products. This pollution also threatens human health through the food chain and affects important economic sectors such as fishing, aquaculture or coastal tourism.
Faced with this scourge, the promises of the carriers of technological solutions are tempting. Between a surface drone « designed to effectively eliminate floating waste » (RanMarine, Netherlands), a floating trash can that « removes marine waste » (Seabin, Australia), or the « development and large-scale deployment of technologies to rid the oceans of plastic » (The Ocean Cleanup, Netherlands), there is something to be happy about.
Nevertheless, these finely elaborated marketing discourses struggle to mask the structural inability of these devices to solve the scourge of plastic pollution at sea on a global scale.
Recall some orders of magnitude: a study published in 2023 in the scientific journal Nature reports a total of plastic waste discharged into the sea of about 500,000 tons per year, a more optimistic figure than those generally advanced. In comparison, over the year 2025, The Ocean Cleanup initiative achieved its best year, removing about 25,000 tons of plastic waste from oceans and rivers combined. The Seabin floating bin, on the other hand, is capable of recovering up to 1.4 tons of waste per year.
These few examples strongly illustrate a discouraging reality: if these devices may possibly have a local, educational or experimental interest, the amount of plastic released into the oceans is far too great for these efforts to respond to the problem in a systemic way.
This is largely explained by the typology of plastic waste: the French Institute for Research for the Use of the Sea estimates that 90% of plastics at sea are microplastics, i.e. particles between 5 millimeters and 1 micrometer [or 0.001 millimeters]. However, the smaller the plastic particles, the more difficult it is to locate them and therefore to collect them. In addition, due to the deposit of microorganisms on their surface, the majority of waste and plastic particles end up sinking. These cleaning initiatives are therefore of limited scope since they only manage to recover floating plastics: according to the estimates of Melanie Bergmann, marine biologist at the Alfred-Wegener Institute, this represents only 1% of all plastics present in the oceans.
This skepticism towards marine pollution control technologies must be coupled with great caution about the good feelings of some patrons with falsely philanthropic ambitions. Without calling into question all the depollution solutions, some of which operate independently, it should be noted that the financing, by petrochemical companies such as Shell, ExxonMobil or Dow Chemical, of projects to combat plastic pollution, such as those carried out by the non-governmental organization Alliance to End Plastic Waste, underlies a clear political strategy.
By displaying a positive action, these companies are relegating their own responsibility in the massive production of plastic (which far exceeds the volumes collected from the initiatives they finance), thus offering themselves a moral guarantee that legitimizes the maintenance of the current production system.
Regulatory timidity
Thus, in the face of the technical impasse of depollution initiatives, it is urgent to concentrate efforts on the most decisive systemic response to the scale of the disaster: that of closing the tap at the source. Reducing the production of plastic (and especially single-use plastics) is much more effective in fighting this scourge than trying to clean up the oceans.
The current regulatory frameworks such as the European Single-Use Plastics Directive [adopted in 2019] are going in the right direction, but still lack ambition and remain limited in their scope. This regulatory timidity reflects a more global political blockage and strong dissensions within the international community. The failure of negotiations on an international treaty against plastic pollution, which has been skating since 2022, is a striking example. The opposition to the text by the oil-producing countries has not yet led to a consensus, as the daily Libération recalled in August.
In order to finally rise to the challenge and in view of the urgency of the situation, public decision-makers and legislators therefore have a historical responsibility: to overcome this situation of blockage by agreeing as soon as possible on the implementation of a legally binding international instrument, making it possible to strictly cap global plastic production. This is the only way we can extract ourselves from our relationship of dependence on plastic, which remains the best way to protect our oceans.
