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Giant Trap Deployed To Catch Plastic Littering the Pacific Ocean Isn't Working (cbsnews.com)
In September, a nonprofit deployed a multimillion-dollar floating structure designed to corral plastic debris littering the Pacific Ocean. But, according to CBS News, the 2,000-foot-long structure hasn't picked up any plastic waste. Slashdot reader pgmrdlm shares the report: A floating device sent to corral a swirling island of trash in the Pacific Ocean between California and Hawaii has not swept up any plastic waste. But the young innovator behind the project said Monday that a fix was in the works. Boyan Slat, 24, who launched the Pacific Ocean cleanup project, said the speed of the solar-powered barrier isn't allowing it to hold on to the plastic it catches. The plastic barrier with a tapered 10-foot-deep screen is intended to act like a coastline, trapping some of the 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic that scientists estimate are swirling in the patch, while allowing marine life to safely swim beneath it. The garbage patch isn't an island and it's even difficult to see with the naked eye, "60 Minutes" reported in September -- it's a vast soup of floating debris, much of it tiny and below the surface.
Ocean Cleanup appears to be HQ'ed in NYC, doesn't have enough financial statements to appear in any charity watch site, and is happily taking people's money. This could be a scam (like those calls your grandma gets about the police ball) built on the plastic straw hype. Seriously, if you feel plastic in the ocean is a problem then please consider donating to reputable organization with a real track record instead.
Something useful to know when assholes want to ban things in the US and Europe: it's not your plastic.
Say no to zealots and totalitarians.
Get some of his engineers on the project
They don't need engineers. They need accountants: Someone who can explain to them that every $1 they spend filtering microparticles out of the ocean would be a hundred times as effective if spent to prevent the trash reaching the ocean in the first place.
I can't think of anything, even the trivial things that are easy to take for granted, that humans ever got right on the first go.
The atomic bomb worked on the first try.
We had enough metal for 3 bombs: Trinity at Alamogordo, Little Boy at Hiroshima, and Fat Man at Nagasaki.
All three worked perfectly.
Absolutely this. So many scientist told this kid that trying to filter plastic from the ocean is literally the last item on the to-do list of actual useful things we could do to help this planet. Cutting off new plastics and trash from entering the ocean is as close to the top as you can get here. All that crowd funded money was a complete waste on tech that's not really been tested and could have been used on any one of the multiple ways we know to filter trash from streams. I give the kid credit that he wants to help out, but blessed if he went the completely opposite direction of anything that could be remotely considered within 500 light-years of the definition of useful.
Of course that is the place to stop it. Doesn't mean you can't clean up the existing mess.
Sig?
They should employ their skimmer in the mouth of the most polluting river, rather than in the ocean. They would catch 10 truckloads on the first day.
This little more than a "smart" driftnet. It's not a surprise.
the problem with actual driftnets is that they have a lot of bycatch because they're designed to trap fish. Whales, Dolphins, Sea Lions, Sharks, etc are just victims. Now if you make a driftnet that is electrified, sharks will at least be repelled by it. Throw in some ultrasonic noises to make it sound like a giant predator, and it will scare the mammals away too. But as for catching plastic, I have a feeling that it will simply never be effective since there's no effective way to grab plastic from water. It floats because it is an oil product. The fragments biodegrade because solar energy simply breaks the molocules that hold it together, and thus things like plastic bags disintegrate, and are also not reusable... thus more end up in trash. Hell, I had to throw in the TRASH two cubic feet of plastic grocery bags because they turned into plastic DUST and was even more toxic than the friggen bags.
If we were smart we would stop using plastic as packaging. Period. Go back to paper for groceries, fast food can use cardboard boxes (Pizza industry is doing just fine.) Don't sell food items with plastic overwrap, you have to order it from the deli specifically, and get a resealable use-once bag, and for food that is easily cross-contaminated (eg hamburger) press it into hamburgers and layer a piece of wax paper between each one (like some frozen burgers actually do) , for cheese, only sell in blocks, no more "singles", Bulk-only. If you want half a block, then have the deli cut half a block. For hard-to-deal with stuff like hard italian cheeses, offer to grind it at the deli into a clean recyclable glass container that the deli sells.
Like in most cases we can switch from plastic to glass, and glass is much easier to recycle. By coming up with glass that is less breakable, that would remove plastic from the trash cycle. People know glass is recycleable. People don't know how to recycle plastic because the are too many kinds of plastic. Glass also sinks in water, so there would be no trash patch even if it did wind up in the ocean. It's not necessarily better that it sinks, but if it sinks that means it's likely to become an artificial reef material rather than the existing plastic bits that are ending up in the stomachs of whales.
Exactly, the real question to ask is why we expect people to succeed on the first try and don't tolerate mistakes.
Perseverance, especially when things fail, is really the key to innovation.
As Edison said:
"I have not failed 10 000 times, I have successfully found 10 000 ways it will not work."
Next time you turn on the lights, perhaps consider the number of iterations it took to make it work, and then ask the question, can we not give this guy two tries at least before we start complaining?
Especially since we know that 90% of the plastic in the ocean is deposited there from just 10 rivers. Catch even half of the plastic from those rivers, and you've reduced plastic in the world oceans by 45%.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
It's pointless cleaning up the place where all the plastic collects if you are just going to continue adding to it.
We should ban the fucking production of plastic except for special circumstances, and also enforce stricter recycling rules, only 10% of plastic is recycled AT ALL, it should be 99% is recycled. Only after that is achieved will it be worthwhile trying to sift it out of the ocean. Fine people littering heavily and that money can be used to help clean up the ocean. Charge people more for every piece of plastic in their garbage (that they haven't even tried to recycle) and pay people who are recycling, when plastic stops entering our rivers and hence into the ocean we can look at cleaning up that mess. Trying to do it now is just a waste of money and resources.
There are three kinds of falsehood: the first is a 'fib,' the second is a downright lie, and the third is statistics.
We should ban the fucking production of plastic except for special circumstances, and also enforce stricter recycling rules, only 10% of plastic is recycled AT ALL, it should be 99% is recycled.
You want to ban all plastic production, except for "special circumstances"? Good luck with that.
What would you replace plastic with?
That's nice and all, but the plastic in the garbage patch isn't from packaging so you're basically being a reactionary dumbfuck. The vast majority is discarded fishing equipment from China and India. Fix their complete disregard for the planet and the problem will be a fuckton easier to address.