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Sea Chair Project Harvests Plastic From the Oceans To Create Furniture
cylonlover writes "You may have heard about the huge floating islands of garbage swirling around in the middle of the Earth's oceans. Much of that waterlogged rubbish is made up of plastic and, like Electrolux with its concept vacuum cleaners, U.K.-based Studio Swine and Kieren Jones are looking to put that waste to good use. As part of an ambitious project, they've come up with a system to collect plastic debris and convert it into furniture. Rather than collecting plastic that washes ashore or is snagged as by-catch in fishing nets, the team hopes to one day go where the trash is, collect and convert it to something useful while still at sea. Sea Chair envisions adapting fishing boats into floating chair factories that trawl for plastic and put it into production on-board."
But how much will it cost to harvest the plastic from the ocean rather than creating it from scratch, whether it be from oil or other sources? (I seem to remember that PET can now be produced from corn by-products, not just oil.) I'm tipping that the balance of cost will not be in favour of this idea for a considerable time, no matter how necessary cleaning up our act may be.
There may be a market for selling these to people who have an environmental conscience, but I would be surprised - albeit very pleased - if it were big enough to sustain a company.
In 20 years, we'll be looking for dolphin-safe plastic items, and lamenting the number of seabirds that're killed as by-catch from the oceanic plastics harvesting industry. Concern will be raised about the waste disposal practices of on-board plastics recycling, but nobody will do anything about it because it happens in international waters.
Sometimes you just can't win.
There is an online documentary on the 'floating garbage islands' somewhere. Not really islands. Just lots of little itty bits of plastic spread over a huuuuge area.
Since the plastic debris is spread thinly over a large large area, you'd need to blow through a fair bit of fuel to collect sufficient amounts of plastic to make a chair.
Doable? yes.
Economical? No.
Unless you could do this with a sailing boat, or a solar powered boat...and from the article...that boat doesn't look like either.
Or maybe you could consider the benefit of removing shitloads of crap from the ocean.
After a cargo accident, millions of tiny white plastic pellets have been washing up on the Hong Kong's shores. No authority, no government cares. Civilians voluntarily organize cleaning up activities every weekend and the situation is still catastrophic. Uncountable fishes have their stomachs stuffed with plastic pellets, but Hong Kong Government still insists that those fishes are harmless and safe to eat. Those fishes are dying of staving because they couldn't take any more real food, and the Government only cares about whether it is safe to eat them.
Sadly, environmental disasters effect everyone in the same planet but they would hardly raise mass concern.
The current plan is to track the discarded floatilla of Windows phones along their migratory path toward plastic island
The same crap that cheap lawn chairs of made of, 1 year exposed to the elements and it crumbles into powder ... why do we need million year plastics to hold beer cans?
Plastics are a cocktail of chemicals.
One of the most important ingredients are UV stabilizers.
This single ingredient more or less dictates the functional lifespan of any plastic that is exposed to sunlight.
Once that UV stabilizer is consumed, UV will break down the plastic until its structural integrity fails.
The industry is working on "biodegradable" plastic, but the term comes with so many asterisks that it's almost meaningless.
In the short term, petroleum based plastics do not biodegrade, they degrade.
"Biodegradable" petroleum plastics just degrade faster.
After that, it's up to the micro-organisms in the environment to break the plastic down.
And if the plastic is in a non-ideal environment, it'll hang around longer.
Land fills are especially bad environments for plastics to degrade in.
/Bioplastics are a while nother story and, while better for the environment, are not a mature technology yet
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!