Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
In fact the little pieces of plastic are apparently microscopic pieces of plastic suspended in the entire water column over a vast area of ocean.
The author, from the documentary above, mentioned that he (she?) travelled to the alleged area to see the plastic and then learnt about the lack of visible suspended solids AND the problem with the local sea life drinking the water and filtering the plastic particles into their own systems.