Slashdot Mirror
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.
People For The Ethical Treatment Of Giants will start a protest campaign.
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.
This may not really help with cleanup but we can at least agree that developed nations are 100% responsible for this plastic mess.
Sadly, these same nations preach to the developing ones about the "need to protect the environment."
Huh!!
Gentrification! How dare you destroy the authentic "vibrance" of that garbage patch!!
But I'm skeptical, as are some of the experts cited in the BBC article, I mean the GPGP is really, really big - 1.6 million square kilometers.
Gonna take a lot to clean that up...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
but with 5 billion new pounds of plastic ending up in the Pacific every year, they're gonna need a whole lot more booms.
Apparently there is also a large plastic presence in the Atlantic in addition to the East and West Pacific gyres.
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...
Its a drop in the ocean. :(
I wonder how Hurricane resistant their design is. . . .
What's it made of?
Those who do not learn from commit history are doomed to regress it.
In 2016 an estimated 8,000,000 metric tons of plastic made its way into the ocean.
http://theconversation.com/far-more-microplastics-floating-in-oceans-than-thought-51974
Given these "traps" collect 75 tons, they'll need to release 1066 traps to collect 1% of the oceans surface plastic..
Seems like an exercise in futility.
[RANDOM MODE]
"...If seven maids with seven mops
Swept it for half a year,
Do you suppose,' the Walrus said,
That they could get it clear?'
I doubt it,' said the Carpenter,
And shed a bitter tear..."
[/RANDOM MODE]
mnem
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43914/the-walrus-and-the-carpenter-56d222cbc80a9
As you do this, your have probably noticed how light and bulky recyclable material is compared to what gets trashed. It largely consists of containers and packaging. Separating this at the source would really cut into our landfill problem.
Over 40,000 peoppe got to feel good while giving Boyan Slat $33 million and making him famous. A win for them and a win for him.
It's like donating at a dinner where Al Gore speaks about the environment. Donors feel good writing checks that cover the cost of the 200 gallons per hour of jet fuel burned in Gore's Lear jet to get him there. Donors feel good because he said "green" fourteen times, Gore gets to jet set around in a Lear jet. Win win.
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.
I'm more of an environmentalist than most in here, but banning plastic straws in 'Murrica is virtue signalling, and the problem being caused by "white privilege" is about as wrong as you can get.
Reducing use of plastic straws is nothing more than solving a problem that can be solved. Sure there probably is some virtue signalling and other stuff too but that doesn't mean it isn't a problem or that we shouldn't bother. Nobody who knows what they are talking about is claiming it is the biggest source of plastic pollution. It's a relatively small part of the problem but if we can mitigate that waste stream then we damn well should. Plastic straws are merely low hanging fruit so pick it while we can.
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
No, it's actually a smart plan. Start with biggest polluters that can be removed for the smallest cost.
That's linear thinking. Measures can be done in parallel; there's no need to not do A because B is more important.
1) Oversimplification: It's not a like in the details to make a fair comparison. You can simplify every action movie into "good guy kills bad people" and say they are all the same. You can not measure the impact Al Gore has trying to herd the cats; you can measure the impact of this plastic sifting. Getting whole countries to wake up earlier is immeasurable. let alone the donor impact easily offsetting jet fuel which Gore has bought CO2 offsets all by himself (for decades now... leading into fallacy 2:)
2) red herrings:
Gore's CO2 use and not living like a cave man as a source to claim hypocrisy. Not the only smear; but it doesn't matter if he eats babies for breakfast because it's irrelevant, off topic illogical propaganda you fell for to the point of spreading it out for free. You should at least try to figure out how to get paid by big oil if you are going to work for them.
Feel Good nothings: On huge problems every move is a drop in the bucket... or a drop in the ocean in this case. Inaction because of the lack of positive feedback available for every solution becomes a huge problem. People need instant feedback and want complete solutions they can grasp (aka the improbable.)
This is a legitimate concern which can be used (and often is) as a weapon against any progress by opposing parties. The reason I say this is a red herring is not because there are not REAL issues with weak or bad ideas and then the likely hood of con men exploiting those ideas but because when it gets to be an unreasonable distraction you then take away from the real rational discussion. Smearing the supporters of a poor idea is a cynical easy to tangent to fall into. Not that it shouldn't be questioned and looked into for actual evidence... but it's largely unnecessary if one just evaluates the proposals with a clear mind. Hence, my reason to bring it up.
This device may serve a useful secondary purpose; because clearly, it isn't practical for it's primary purpose.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
As the pacific garbage patch is supposedly microscopic particles that can't be seen by the human eye. The garbage patch has yet to be shown that it even exists.
No, it's actually a smart plan. Start with biggest polluters that can be removed for the smallest cost.
Wow, where to start...
1) There is no resource constraint here necessitating a particular order of action. We have the money and manpower to address multiple waste streams at the same time.
2) There is no reason to delay mitigate a small waste stream merely because it is (relatively) small if we have the ability to mitigate it (which we do)
3) The biggest sources of plastic pollution will almost certainly take much longer to address so delaying action on the smaller ones is foolish
4) You're line of thinking is a classic false dilemma fallacy.
Measures can be done in parallel; there's no need to not do A because B is more important.
Yes, sounds good, except they aren't being done in parallel. People get rid of straws, and then feel so good about themselves that they stop.
Not to mention banning straws is actively fucking over people without the motor-skills necessary to drink from a glass.
Nobody is banning straws. .
Correction: http://www.foxnews.com/politic... https://www.nytimes.com/2018/0... https://www.fastcompany.com/40...
Yes, there is a lot ov virtue signaling going on, while the countries that are doing the actual plastic pollution continue unabated.
For me, it is a matter of whether we want to pat ourselves on the back, perhaps give out friend of the earth trophies, or actually fix the problem.
Banning plastic straws in the US is simply not going to accomplish anything.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
That's later, when we figure out how to make money from what they pick up.
I saw a study once that said you have to re-use a "bag for life" (the sturdy reusable palstic bags) over 178 times before it's actually economically / ecologically viable over just making thin disposable plastic bags. For a shopping bag, that's probably, what... several years of usage?
I imagine the aluminium bottle is similar.
That said, why people are drinking bottled water at all over what comes out of the tap, or just refilling those same bottles from... say... a 50l bottle of the same water... Isn't that what water-coolers were for?
You would think that portion of it would actually be relatively easy to clean up. Patience and robotic determination (and some dangling hooks) could snag those with a lot less pushing of water out of the way. Grant you, that's going to get/kill a lot of fish, but I presume these floating nets are still getting fish, too.
Bottles, straws, etc. have got to be a lot harder to control, snag, collect, etc.
Plenty of places are choosing only to get rid of straws, while still selling (much bigger) plastic cups lids, and bags, so people are not doing everything in parallel that they could.
Nice attempt to move the goalposts by introducing a separate issue. Yes we should deal with the other waste streams as well but we need to start somewhere. Straws are easily the least necessary and most easily replaced component so it's a reasonable place to start. (most people can drink from a cup without a straw but a straw isn't very useful without a cup) Nobody is arguing that there aren't other sources of plastic waste that we should be working on as well. Plenty of places are already starting to do so including banning plastic bags and similar actions.
Nope. Every action has a cost, and not just monetary but also public goodwill. If you start doing trivial stuff that is not really bringing any benefit to the oceans, but you annoy the public, then you lose credit, and you'll have a harder time getting support for further regulations.
That is a ridiculous line of logic and again is a form of false dilemma. You do what is possible to do when it is possible to do it. If we as a society aren't willing to deal with something as trivial as disposable straws then we sure as hell aren't going to succeed in dealing with the big plastic waste streams. And there is nothing preventing us from addressing a variety of waste streams simultaneously. Furthermore we control our consumption of plastic straws and other disposables. We do not control China's waste streams. Ergo it makes sense to start with the waste streams we do control before worrying about the ones we don't. Little hard to convince your neighbor to clean up their act if you aren't doing everything you can to set a good example.
Can they melt down all that plastic into Great Pacific Garbage Patch Kids dolls? I'd buy the heck out of those!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Good luck recycling any of that when it will have also caught a lot of the radioactive fallout from the Fukushima melt down.
You live and learn, or you don't learn much.
Pretty nice that the earth gathers all this stuff in one place for us to be able to easily get rid of. Thanks Garbage Patch!
These aren't nets.
I would go further link it directly to aid. I further have this idea of import tariffs on goods that are not manufactured to the same enviromental protection standards as the importing nation has to level the playing field.
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. ... Suppose we seed with one of the algal species that forms surface mats while it grows, ...
While you're at it, how about seeding it with some of the recently discovered bacteria that EAT PLASTIC?
Most plastics are quite a good energy source for anything that can digest them.
Or, better yet, how about transplanting the relevant genes into algae and/or microplankton that live where it accumulates?
Microscopic bits of plastic are a problem because they hang around? Make an appropriately-sized critter for which they're a main dish in a nutritious breakfast, that lives in the places where they end up.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
> That said, why people are drinking bottled water at all over what comes out of the tap, or just refilling those same bottles from... say... a 50l bottle of the same water... Isn't that what water-coolers were for?
Tap water in many region of the world is just bad. In the US, in the two cities I have lived so far, tap water is processed in a way that makes it taste awful. So, I understand why people are not drinking tap water. I filter mine and that seems to fix the taste problem. But boiling does not seem to improve the taste (coffee out of unfiltered tap water at my home is undrinkable for instance, while doing it from filtered water is fine).
So, while there are options other than purely bottled water, they make some sort of sense.
And that's before talking about regions where tap water is just not safe. We talked about Flint, Michigan a few years ago, but there are other regions that have just as bad water as that.
Well, as long as you used a forceful No, then I should believe you.
NO. You're the moron referred to earlier, who seems to feel if he screams enough at people they'll see the light, self flagellate to an appropriate level, declare you omnipotent, and do what you say. Instead of actually attempting a solution.
So my answer is: Screw you, in your honor I think I'll go buy a few more things wrapped in plastic. I don't really want to, but your jerky attitude makes me want to flip you the bird.