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Giant Plastic Trap Breaks, Gets Towed Back To Land (npr.org)
The "Ocean Cleanup" project deployed a 2,000-foot floating debris trap in September near a drifting plastic patch in the Pacific Ocean that's twice as big as Texas. It broke.
An anonymous reader quotes NPR: Invented by Boyan Slat when he was just 17, the barrier has so far done some of what it was designed to accomplish. It travels with wind and wave propulsion, like a U-shaped Pac-Man hungry for plastic. It orients itself in the wind and it catches and concentrates plastic, sort of. But as Slat, now 24, recently discovered with the beta tester for his design, plastic occasionally drifts out of its U-shaped funnel. The other issue with the beta tester, called System 001, is that last week, a 60-feet-long end section broke off.
The first issue, Slat said, was likely due to the device's speed. In a September interview with NPR, he said the device averages about four inches per second, which his team has now concluded is too slow. The break in the barrier was due to an issue with the material used to build it. "In principle, I think we are relatively close to getting it working," Slat said in an interview Saturday with NPR's Michel Martin. "It's just that sometimes the plastic is also escaping again. Likely what we have to do is we have to speed up the system so that it constantly moves faster than the plastic." For the material failure, Slat said his team will probably try to locally reinforce the system to combat the problem of material fatigue.
Slat's U-shaped plastic trap is now being towed the 800 miles back to Hawaii for repairs.
An anonymous reader quotes NPR: Invented by Boyan Slat when he was just 17, the barrier has so far done some of what it was designed to accomplish. It travels with wind and wave propulsion, like a U-shaped Pac-Man hungry for plastic. It orients itself in the wind and it catches and concentrates plastic, sort of. But as Slat, now 24, recently discovered with the beta tester for his design, plastic occasionally drifts out of its U-shaped funnel. The other issue with the beta tester, called System 001, is that last week, a 60-feet-long end section broke off.
The first issue, Slat said, was likely due to the device's speed. In a September interview with NPR, he said the device averages about four inches per second, which his team has now concluded is too slow. The break in the barrier was due to an issue with the material used to build it. "In principle, I think we are relatively close to getting it working," Slat said in an interview Saturday with NPR's Michel Martin. "It's just that sometimes the plastic is also escaping again. Likely what we have to do is we have to speed up the system so that it constantly moves faster than the plastic." For the material failure, Slat said his team will probably try to locally reinforce the system to combat the problem of material fatigue.
Slat's U-shaped plastic trap is now being towed the 800 miles back to Hawaii for repairs.
They should just leave it out there. The next one will pick it up.
Instead of being emotionally attached to the sea, because he's sailing and life's at the sea, Zlat could have done so much more, with way less money. how? by looking at the facts and talking to experts. but that would require sanity and desire for facts. fact 1: most of the rubbish poured in the sea comes from 4 big Rivers, all in developing countries, mostly China. the problem is there not on the sea, don't fight symptoms, but causes
fact 2: just watch this clip:
https://youtu.be/8PavA4rUypE
you will never ever outrun the speed of pollution with this childish single-minded idea. what is this guy smoking? the most interesting point in this video is the cake shift at the end. the problem is uneducated poor people. period. your straw ban will give the outcry mob a boner it fixes nothing
Enough said - it's nice that someone is trying to do something, and I'm sure the guy is good-intentioned - but pretty much all the experts said this would happen and the resources would be better spent elsewhere.
I told you so. Optimist in me says pls try again. Pessimist says don't bother, humanity will shit where it eats no matter what.
They won't do it themselves after flushing plastic into the pacific for 50 years, and now the ungratefulness when this Dutch guy and his non-profit can't clean up their mess properly. Wow. Just how quickly Americans think the world owes them something.
More like cleaning up after India and Asian countries.
-geekpoet
I, and probably you too, came up with much greater things when we were young.
And we could also have actually created them.
But I don't remember us having millions to pay engineers and entire damn towing ships and so on.
I literally (not making this up) had toilet rolls, marbles and dirt to play with.[1]
So ... where do I apply for that opportunity mother lode?
___
[1] That’s what my parents could offer us. To make up for it, we stole stuff from construction sites, and used things from the forest, to build tree houses. Which was a lot of fun. But would I have had a ruby and a neon tube, I would probably have been able to build a laser before puberty (in the 80s, mind you). I knew exactly how.
Almost all the plastic trash going into the sea is coming from a handful of rivers in Asia & Africa. So why not put this plastic trap at the river mouths of those high trash rivers, like the Ganges or Yangtze? Seems to me like it would be easier to catch the plastic in such concentrated locations, before UV rays & ocean waves have broken it down into little bits.
Solutions to big problems seldom work perfectly the first 10 attempts.
Lots of examples of these problems around the world.
Trying to do something is a good thing. We learn more from our failures, after all. Hopefully, someone rich will decide it is worth funding the cleanup.
That's rich.
Can we have the Dodo and several hundred other extinct animals back from the Dutch?
You morons literally created a sport where you beat dodos with a stick and drove them to extinction.
Also, India and China produce 83% of the world's plastic pollution, you dumb motherfucker.
Did the boom that failed meet OPA-90 requirements for all open water applications?
Passionately Indifferent
The plastic thing sent out to collect plastic trash from the ocean turns out to have been made of plastic trash.
Don’t send plastic to do metal’s job. (Because metal never fails at sea... oh, wait... shit. Send paper... SEND PAPER!)
Seriously though. The thing that was sent out to collect plastic trash turned out to be trash and made of plastic. The irony is just too delicious!
Our reign has gone on long enough. Indeed. Summon the meteors.
The media loves this sort of shit because it presents a simple solution to a complex problem, but it pretty much never works. "Boy Genius comes up with perfect new solution for Problem X". The last time this happened was with Kevin Costner, and that stupid oil spill sucking machine. It also didn't work.
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/07/dirty-history-kevin-costners-oil-spill-machines/352739/
Are we ever going to stop falling for this crap?
Your consumption per capita is ten times that of India and China, and you also have a cultural dislike of recycling, because "it's for poor people".
Stop shifting your mess onto people in the 3rd world. You and your uncontrolled mass-consumption is what has caused the problem, not India or China.
It boggles my mind that people by the coast would litter so much they created a plastic island twice the size of TX. That is completely unacceptable. Go inland, like the midwest, and you'll barely see any litter at all and we don't even have an ocean to worry about. You just don't do it because it's ignorant and nobody likes looking at trash. WTF California?
Somebody makes an invention that, in beta form, is flawed. They see a clear path to success so they go about making that happen. Then people come and crap. I remember when conversations on /. were decent, but it's been a while.
Go ingest some mercury. You will adapt just fine
Curious if this did work how many would be needed to reduce the garbage patch by a significant amount. Much of the plastic has moved down in the water table and that's not affected.
I guess I could go over to their site and look around for info but nah. I only stop by /. these days for the flame wars.
The entire idea is flawed and self-serving. 8 million tons of plastic enter the oceans each year. Even if this thing worked 100% you couldn't build enough of them to make an appreciable dent in the incoming waste stream.
The giant trap is made to catch plastic that the water has broken into tiny pieces and the plastic catchers are also broken into tiny pieces?
Who would have thought.
You are still 12 in your head.
'Better' compression algorithms come at a tradeoff of greater compression time. In the 21st century anyhow, low hanging fruit is long gone.
You're just a moron who thinks he's a genius, has likely never actually built anything. But you sure love your ideas.
'Engineering school produces unhirable robots'? You've hung yourself. You understand nothing.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Why bother to clean up litter at all? If we reduce the waste stream and clean up over years, we'll improve things. There's no reason to give up before we even start.
Go ahead and clean it up. Are you not understanding? It would require millions of these things to make any difference (and they would need to work). The point is we need to stop producing it. You cannot clean it up. It is too late for that.
Where do you get your math? Here's theirs: https://www.theoceancleanup.co...
The currents determine where things go. And there's a giant trash heap sitting there. Send some barges and scoop the crap up and send them back. The currents will bring the vast majority of it to you.
Fecking idiots, didn't do reasonable testing, of course the plastic escapes again.
It broke, is it made of plastic?? fecking idiots
Want to design a system to catch plastic, get a fisherman, they know the sea, they know how to catch things.
Don't listen to 17 year old pimply youth, they don't know shit, nice thought bubble, that's all.
Go well
Can you show your work on that?
The nice thing about garbage dumped in the oceans, if there can be said to be any nice thing about it, is that a lot of it actually ends up in several relatively small patches. I've actually the north atlantic garbage patch. Pretty gross the way garbage builds up there. I suspect it's a node where currents create a convergence. Whatever the cause, it at least serves to bring quite a bit of the floating garbage to one place. Millions of these devices wouldn't be needed, though I agree with the other commenter that it would be interesting to find out where you got that number.
I suspect you were one of those kids who, when your parents were away for a week, did nothing until, on the last day, you looked at the kitchen and slumped your shoulders in defeat that nothing could now be done. Any mess can be cleaned up. Once you decide on what must be done, how to do it is only a detail. Luckily, other people than you are concerning themselves with those details. But please, feel free to continue to sit in your armchair and tell everyone how it can't be done. We appreciate your input.
Plastic! It's the stuff dreams are made of!
Plastic! It's the stuff your peen is made of!
I have, literally, never heard anyone say "Recycling is for poor people". It's like a made up argument my nephew uses "Yeah, so this guy said black people were bad, so that's why I got in that fight!"
I would suggest you take a small look in the mirror and clean up your own house before attacking your fictitious boogeyman.