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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.
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!!
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. :(
[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
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.
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.