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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.
Little Lisa Recycling Plant is shutting down
Get some of his engineers on the project... Its right up his alley. :)
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Is floating trash
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.
of an ocean going platform powered by burning plastic in a series of boilers powering turbines, instead of solar. /s
Both the plastic and system are being carried by the current. However, wind and waves propel only the system, as the floater sits just above the water surface, while the plastic is primarily just beneath it. The system thus moves faster than the plastic, allowing the plastic to be captured.
The system consists of a 600-meter-long floater that sits at the surface of the water and a tapered 3-meter-deep skirt attached below. The floater provides buoyancy to the system and prevents plastic from flowing over it, while the skirt stops debris from escaping underneath.
Everybody was so busy jerking each off that no one actually tried to see whether it would work.
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.
Or maybe they'll fix it. A skimmer isn't exactly rocket science, much less science fiction. Dude tried something to solve a problem, rather than just demanding a new $10 billion from taxpayers to fly around in his private jet lecturing us. I give him credit for trying, and if it's needs some tweaks, that's to be expected.
...it wouldn't make a difference. 86 million tons of plastic is dumped into the ocean every year. You can't build enough of these to even make a small dent (even if they worked 100% optimally). But some hipster got his kickstarter going and everyone can feed good about themselves while they sip their plastic water bottles.
Clean up small pieces of floating plastic by intentionally setting adrift a large piece of plastic... what could go wrong. Genius.
I think it's a bit early to say the idea is beyond any hope. 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. Typically it takes a lot of mistakes and adjustments and even after something actually works, there's almost always loads of room for improvement.
Hopefully this does eventually work out, because the rest of the world seems to be doing fuck all about the problem.
You ever try to pick up a piece of plastic in the bathtub? It's hard!
It would be nice if this worked. There is a wave powered capture system that I believe worked but it probably doesn't scale nicely...
The next thing to try will likely be engineering microbes to eat our waste which they are working toward...
https://www.sciencealert.com/n...
The first version of something doesn't work as intended and needs mods. Sounds like every software project I ever worked on.
The "island" part of it is big media hype. It's not an island, there are no huge patches of plastic floating in the middle of the ocean that you could land a plane on. No boats are crashing into the plastic.
There are basically microplastics everywhere in the water, but especially close to the surface and they are supposedly going to collect where the currents bring them. Those are, as the name implies, mostly microscopic in nature and the effect on health really hasn't been studied well, the only studies so far are either in test tubes or in mice where in very high concentrations have shown as a cause of stress, fewer reproductive cells and cancer. The reason they are microplastics is because the sun and ocean has been really good at breaking big plastic things down.
The idea you're going to scoop them out of the water with a float is absurd. They're not even on the surface, you need something like a molecular sieve from the surface to ~20cm under the water which would be highly detrimental for marine life. You may catch a plastic barrel or bottle once in a blue moon but the ocean is huge.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
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.
I get it that solar is a good idea to be considered for each project. On the other hand, diesel also need to be considered as an option. In this case, it seems like reliable high power-to-weight engines would be the better fit.
And given that, if it worked, this thing would have a massive positive environmental impact, I can't see why the insistence on not using the right tool.
of course it isn't
it's drifting at the same rate as the plastic bits propelled by the same forces
you fecking ijots
Go well
the only way to beat plastics is the smart people who invented the chemistry have to invent a way to undo the molecular chains to safe components.
Go well
But the Manhattan Project had the most intelligent and capable men of that generation working on it. This is the exact opposite situation.
If you research it further you will learn its a family run enterprise build to scam environment grants.
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
That is arguably the entire point.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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.
And she would have been the best man in the project, too, if she hadn't died before the start of WWII from radiation poisoning. (I presume she would have emigrated to U.S. to flee Nazi persecution, as many good men in physics and chemistry did.)
"Did you try rebooting it?"
Table-ized A.I.
A lot of them aren't micro-plastics, they come in centimeter-sized pieces, too. Those are diffuse in the ocean though, they aren't piled up, as you said.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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?
James Dyson has pretty pretty successful with his cyclonic vacuum. He says he made 5,127 different prototypes before getting it right.
I suspect he's being liberal in his counting for hype purposes, but it's also clear that he didn't nail it on the first try.
Boyan Slat has already explained that this news is incorrect. It's not functioning 100% but still working as intended, some refinements are still needed, nothing that cannot be solved.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
I totally commend people willing to clean up the existing mess, but yes, we need to stop the source. On Monday I attended a lunch lecture from Beth Terry, author of Plastic Free. It was part of a series hosted by Oceana (https://oceana.org). Here's a short post I wrote on medium: https://medium.com/@davepander...
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.
Only because they'd already tested the hell out of the subassemblies.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
... stop dumping plastic into the ocean in the first place and then worry about getting the plastic that's already there out?
If we all decide we want to do this than we can move beyond bullshit feel-good projects and throw another few billion at plastic vacuums or something to fix things.
That sounds more like a plan, doesn't it?
Just saying ...
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
We can help this along by setting up an environment with plenty of sunlight and gentle agitation.
Oh, we already did.
So I did a cursory search on him and his operation.
I didn't find anything about scamming grants.
And yes I know Wikipedia isn't perfect, but it is usually pretty close, and there is not a Controversy section on him.
It appears he has investors, looking for ways to capitalize on recycling, but I don't see anything about scams.
He makes no claims to guarantee this will work but at least he is trying.
What are you doing?
Perhaps you could provide something besides just a baseless claim to scam mod points on slashdot.
is that the recycling places sell the plastic to companies in China and other places but they have no idea what actually happens to the plastic once they sell it. The * HOPE * is that it is dispose of it properly but the reality is that in many (most?) cases the plastic is simply dumped in the ocean.
Unlike metal and paper, there is no economical way to recycle plastic. About all you can really do with it is burn it. And we have rules against that. So the recycling companies, out to make a profit just like every other business, simply ship it to the Chinese. It is the cheapest way for them to get rid of the stuff. And with no oversight in place to monitor what happens to it they can just say "Hey, not my problem".
Step 1 - stop using plastics in the first place
Step 2 - get some actual oversight over where the shit goes until Step 1 is in place
Are you saying that if Japan hadn't surrendered right away, we wouldn't have been able to nuke them any more times?
The Dyson company agrees. They say their vacuums suck.
When its at a certain weight, bag it, gps it, let it go, save energy. Others collect
Teenager "invents" device to solve complex engineering problem. Project fails. Gee, didn't see that coming.
Are you saying that if Japan hadn't surrendered right away, we wouldn't have been able to nuke them any more times?
It would have taken a few months to generate enough fissile material for another bomb. Maybe late October.
Kokura was the next city scheduled to be nuked. It was the original target for Fat Man, but it was clouded over on the morning of August 9th, so the B-29 was diverted to the alternate target of Nagasaki.
Well, Pierre might have, if he hadn't gotten himself run over.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
less problems...
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