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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
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.
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!
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.
Here are some photos of "rivers of trash" flowing into the ocean.
As long as this continues, it is absurd to send ships thousands of miles out to sea to strain a few microparticles out of the ocean.
The place to stop pollution is at the source.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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
... you've reduced plastic in the world oceans by 45%.
You've reduced the plastic reaching the world's oceans by 45%.
FTFY.
No sig today...
If they had some more engineers, and fewer multimedia people, they would have tested a prototype version by pulling it behind a boat at various speeds and see what the actual requirements are.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Especially since we know that 90% of the plastic in the ocean is deposited there from just 10 rivers.
Except it's not. 90% of the plastic that reaches the ocean FROM RIVERS comes from just 10 rivers. The actual number you're looking for is closer to 25%. We discussed this only yesterday: https://www.scientificamerican...
I think it comes down the the misunderstanding of the garbage patch in the Pacific. Many people seem to think it is like a solid island or otherwise tighly packed area of garbage, but while it is many time above the levels of populution it should be, it is not exactly dense (1-2 plastic objects per football field).
a) A huge percent of third-world waste is production run-off for first-world consumers, made by first-world companies working there.
b) Another large chunk is trash from first-world countries shipped to the third-world dumping grounds. The pile of waste in the photo at the top of this article is in China -- it's all dumped waste from the USA.
c) This sort of thing can happen to any city if its waste pipeline breaks down for some reason. NYC's garbage strike in 1968, for example, created similar situations. The pictures linked to by Shanghai Bill include Lebanon. Lebanon is not a third-world country, and Beirut is definitely not a third-world city. It's just a city whose dump filled up and they couldn't negotiate anyone else to take the garbage. Similar situations are developing in the USA right now because China closed its borders to our recyclable waste (see the link I included in (b) above).
Don't be so quick to judge.