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Giant Trap Is Deployed To Catch Plastic Littering the Pacific Ocean (nytimes.com)
A nonprofit has deployed a multimillion-dollar floating boom designed to corral plastic debris littering the Pacific Ocean (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source). The 2,000-foot-long structure left San Francisco Bay on Saturday. According to The New York Times, Ocean Cleanup "aims to trap up to 150,000 pounds of plastic during the boom's first year at sea." From the report: Within five years, with the creation of dozens more booms, the organization hopes to clean half of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Over the next several days, the boom will be towed to a site where it will undergo two weeks of testing. If everything goes as planned, the boom will then be brought to the garbage patch, nearly 1,400 miles offshore, where it is expected to arrive by mid-October, said Boyan Slat, 24, the Dutch inventor and entrepreneur who founded Ocean Cleanup.
The cleanup system is supposed to work like this: After the boom detaches from the towing vessel, the current is expected to pull it into the shape of a "U." As it drifts along, propelled by the wind and waves, it should trap plastic "like Pac-Man," the foundation said on its website. The captured plastic would then be transported back to land, sorted and recycled. The boom has an impenetrable skirt that hangs nearly 10 feet below to catch smaller pieces of plastic. The nonprofit said marine life would be able to pass underneath.
The cleanup system is supposed to work like this: After the boom detaches from the towing vessel, the current is expected to pull it into the shape of a "U." As it drifts along, propelled by the wind and waves, it should trap plastic "like Pac-Man," the foundation said on its website. The captured plastic would then be transported back to land, sorted and recycled. The boom has an impenetrable skirt that hangs nearly 10 feet below to catch smaller pieces of plastic. The nonprofit said marine life would be able to pass underneath.
Most of the plastic in the ocean comes from a handful of rivers. Put the giant trap in the mouths of those rivers, and you'll catch a lot more.
Most of the plastic comes from India and China. I'll let you argue about their development.
Eight million tons of plastic is dumped into the Pacific every year, mostly by third-world countries. This floating boom is estimated to collect 150,000lb (68 tons) a year. So to stand still, you'd need 8000000/68 of them, i.e. 117,647 multimillion-dollar floating booms. Let's be generous and say they cost $2m each. That's $235,294,118,000.
As there are 195 countries in the world, it would be cheaper and far more effective to use that $235bn so that each country in the world runs a $1bn campaign to recycle/replace all plastic. Though considering that most of the plastic comes from just 10 countries...
Seeding areas of open ocean with nutrients that promote the rapid growth of sutrface algae has been suggested as a way of sequestering atmospheric and ocean-dissolved CO2. The Pacific gyre would already be an ideal place to do this, because nutrient and algae would be held in the gyre by surface circulation, rather than being scattered.
Suppose we seed with one of the algal species that forms surface mats while it grows, with some closely matched nutrient that promotes temporary explosive growth of it? As it grows, a surface mat would entrain whatever is floating there. When it dies and sinks, it would pull down trash and particles floating near the surface. As a bonus, such a mat would kill and pull down a lot of fish under it - the fish that have been ingesting the plastic micro particles associated with the trash. We don’t want those fish to stay in the food chain.
We need more technological hubris. It’s the only way to solve the really big problems.
Where do you think most of the crap at WalMart is coming from? Exactly.
WalMart is not the one telling the manufacturers to dump their garbage in the rivers.
Besides, check google images for "plastic garbage rivers", and you'll see that it's a lot of plastic bottles and bags, not manufacturing waste.
Tiny fragments of plastics are not going to be caught by such floating device.
The big chunks of plastic visible at the surface are only a fraction of the amount of plastic in the ocean.
The tiny bits of plastic are ingested by sea life and pollute all the food chain.
I know no solution for this other than stop using oil based plastics as disposable material entirely. But this device is not going to solve anything. At best it will hides the issue if it can remove the large and visible plastic chunks.
Léa Gris