Former US Navy officer Victor Vescovo, now an investor and explorer, holds the world record for most visits to the Challenger Deep: the ocean’s deepest place, 35,876 feet below the surface. (By contrast, Mount Everest is 29,032 feet tall.)
While sitting at the seafloor on one of his dives, he looked out the portal and watched an object with the letter S on it floating by. He had encountered, at the bottom of the world, a piece of trash. It certainly wasn’t the only piece of trash he’d see down there, but it was one of the more memorable.
As we know, not all trash ends up where it belongs. And it can travel far beyond where it was first littered. Uncontained garbage often gets washed into drains, canals, and waterways by rain and wind. From there, it can make its way into the ocean.
There are also times when people deliberately dump waste into the ocean, on an “out of sight, out of mind” sort of principle. This has been an especially popular way to get rid of toxic trash, such as pharmaceutical and nuclear waste. (If you want to learn more about this history, and deep sea trash as a whole, I recommend this excellent excerpt from James Bradley’s new book Deep Water: The World in the Ocean.)
Water’s really good at carrying stuff, and a great deal of trash will sink. So, a lot of this waste ends up in the deepest parts of the sea.
The Mariana Trench holds old trash bags and other refuse. Scientists estimate that there are two to three million tons (tons!) of microplastics in seafloor sediment alone. Ocean trenches get a higher concentration of trash, as it sinks to the deepest points. Yet upwelling can also cycle microplastics from the depths back toward the surface.
Deep sea life has learned to live in, on, and among this trash.
It may seem innocuous when sea life makes plastic waste their home. But it’s important to remember that over time, that waste breaks down into microplastics, enters the food chain, and becomes deadly. (Microplastics can also get stuck to corals and sponges. Scientists are still working to figure out how these animals are affected by this.)
The creatures living on and among nets and bottles and bags are adapted to hard rocky surfaces, which is why they’ll go for plastic in a pinch. Seabed mining aims to remove the mineral-rich hard surfaces these creatures need.
Deep sea mining could add new risks of pollution, too, from lost equipment to waste spilled (or dumped) from ships. Even industry regulations can’t prevent accidents. Any form of industrialization is likely to bring new waste to the places it operates.
Still, support for deep sea mining continues to emerge. Japan is pursuing mining its local seabed, with plans to be ready by the end of this decade. India has applied for new mining exploration permits in the Indian Ocean, and is partnering with Russia to build the necessary equipment. The International Seabed Authority is meeting this month in Jamaica to work on mining regulations for the vast global seabed.
And a bill newly introduced to US Congress calls for US infrastructure, funding, and general support for deep sea mining. It’s called the Responsible Use of Seafloor Resources Act of 2024.
Its introduction quickly raised stock prices for The Metals Company (TMC), an influential Canadian deep sea mining brand, which hopes to process its mined metals in the US. In the last three years, TMC has spent $680,000 to lobby the US government for deep sea mining – an investment that may be starting to pay off.
The new bill cites China’s current power over mineral resources, and the desire for the US to source them from elsewhere, lest China decide to cut off supplies. It also calls for an evaluation of the potential of mining the US seabed (although arguably, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management is already doing that).
Many countries and companies want seabed minerals, as these raw materials can help meet fervent global desires for technology. Yet images of deep sea waste raise the question: are these environments not facing enough already?
Minerals from the deep are largely desired for their use in electronics. But we have an untapped supply of these minerals already here on land: e-waste. A new UN report shows that electronic waste is growing five times faster than e-waste recycling efforts are. An estimated five billion phones were thrown away in 2022 alone.
Recycling minerals from electronics is notoriously difficult, but it’s not impossible. Taking minerals from what we’ve already built would negate many of the rationales behind deep sea mining.
So would reducing the overall use of electronics. We could, for example, build fewer, simpler, and longer-lasting smartphones. (We could, for that matter, choose to live life without them.)
There are plenty of other options for reduction, too. For example, cryptocurrency mining, which I’ve mentioned before as an inessential culprit of growing energy demand, creates an iPhone’s worth of e-waste per single transaction.
I often wonder what might happen if the world took its investments in deep sea mining (a high-tech, high-cost venture) and put them into e-waste reduction and recycling efforts. All that money and innovation would stand a chance of solving these challenges quickly. A focus on recycling electronics, and reducing demand for new ones, could provide many countries with local supply chains for minerals, while relieving the environmental strain of new mines (at sea or on land).
It would, of course, be a huge shift in the way some parts of the world operate. But it would be a shift for the better. The focus on modern technology at the expense of all else – from AI processing centers to smartphones to deep sea excavators – is perhaps the greatest environmental problem for us to solve in the 21st century.