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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.
Any time anyone tries to do something good for the environment there will always be some armchair warrior like you trying to shit on everything. Thankfully nobody needs to take what you say seriously.
both have to be looked after...
your straw ban will give the outcry mob a boner it fixes nothing
How come I think you are actually a part of said outcry mob? Oh, perhaps because you are riding on one of their favorite themes: "This single measure won't fix all of the problem, so let's just do nothing." And in face, now you've brought the second measure into the discussion, and discarded it right away (like a used plastic straw).
Seriously: No the straw ban will not fix any more than a tiny part of the plastic problem (but actually, it will help reducing local pollution levels). Further, I am highly sceptical that this plastic trap thing will ever work.
But arguing not look into any partial solution, because it does not fix the whole mess, is a really sad excuse for inaction.
Prototypes rarely works perfect the first time. Build it stronger, try again. Normal for untested novel devices.
Also, it doesn't matter if the thing occationally looses a piece of plastic - as long as it catches more than it leaks.
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.
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.
both have to be looked after...
But I'm not certain we are looking after both. If the well known sources of this problem were to stop dumping plastics, the problem would largely disappear.
At that point the remaining problem would be the plastic microspheres. That is something the first world has to own.
Not the large scale dumping of plastics into the ocean from Africa and China.
I get the UN notices, and darned if they don't try to lay the blame for this at our feet.
Now if we're serious about this and don't want to play the cards against the modern world game, a source based solution might be:
Recycling plastic waste. We do it here in the USA.
If we want to pump money into it, help African nations that cause much of the problem build the plants to do this. China is a problem, but leadership has proven sensitive to shame. Right now since it is somehow not their fault, there is no reason for them to stop.
The problem nations can collect the plastic at the point where it enters the ocean at first. Hopefully they would start a recycling program that doesn't involve sewerizing their rivers, but that's more of an internal problem.
Because much of any damage that is done happens before the plastics settle into a mid ocean gyre, we really do have to see this ocean vacuum"solution" as a lame one based more on political considerations of who is easiest to blame.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
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.
Fascinating, my dear coward. Perhaps you could enlighten us on how China and Africa dumping almost the entirety of oceanic plastic is the fault of teh evilz 'murricans?
I dunno, me hearty - do we want to actually fix this problem? If we do, we don't wait until the plastic assembles into a gyre in the middle of the ocean. We stop it at the source. And we know exactly where the sources are. And they aren't in the evilz 'murrica.
But it is easier to just have a blame target for everything I suppose, making you more of a prejudiced bigot than those you hate.
Let us know how that works out for ya, mkay?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
All? (Some is recycled here in Brazil too... Some cities here do almost all: that's not enough, not even close...)
Saving the environment.
1000 of ship-miles and lots of construction per year.
I'm just joking and maybe in the end it can be beneficial / advantages outweight disadvantages but so far ..
Where I live we collect plastic separately. We (the inhabitants of my city) were told that the plastic would be recycled. Now it turns out that it is 'burned in an environmentally friendly way' in a separate oven. Yay! The only incentive to keep separating it now is the fact that we don't have to pay for the removal of the plastic.
-- Cheers!
At least he's trying. I see nobody else try something like what he does.
-- Cheers!
Mixed plastics are best recycled by being used as fuel. That is a harsh economic fact.
If you can't incinerate for power, then burying is the next best option. 'Throwing into nearest river' isn't in the top ten, neither is 'losing money hand sorting by chemistry so you can mix it with new plastic and make extra brittle new things'.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
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
fixing the post (HTML on mobile is an adventure: no "preview"):
All? (Some is recycled here in Brazil too... Some cities here do almost all: that's not enough, not even close...)
Perfect is surely the pernicious enemy of good. We have four recycling setups here where I am. One is the municipal, which takes glass, aluminum, most plastics, paper and cardboard. Large metallic items can be dropped off at our transfer station gratis. Oddball plastics that are recyclable are now being taken at the nature conservancy locations, and they also take large cardboard items - think the box a refrigerator comes in.
The last line is the local people who will buy copper and other metals from you. I have bags of wire that I just drop off for them.
Is it all of every recycleable item? That's probably not attainable. But one thing is for certain, precious little makes it into rivers that dump in the ocean. We don't do badly, The first world's contribution to the problem is in microspheres. But we'll take care of that as well.
So let us look at where evil America is in the list of criminals befouling our oceans with plastic. From eco watch: https://www.ecowatch.com/these... Hardly a conservative anti-ecological site. They even have vegan pink hair dye recipes. China, indonesia, Phillipines, Vietnam, Thailand.
https://www.acsh.org/news/2018...
90 percent. 90 freaking percent of the plastic pollution. The USA could disappear tomorrow, and it would hardly make a dent in the amount of plastic dumped in the ocean.
So no, the USA does not recycle 100 percent of all materials. I'm skeptical that anyone is. Oh, bullshit - no one is. But worrying over our lack of perfection, to blame it on us, while 90 percent is coming from elsewhere is simply irrational. And won't fix the problem either.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
We recycle.... by putting it on boats to China. China shut that down last year during the tariff fight.
If they don't want it any more, we'll find a different way to recycle it. But we won't chuck it into the rivers.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
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.
There are 150,000,000 tons of plastic in the oceans now, and 8,000,000 tons new each year. Each trap was supposed to clean up 150,000 POUNDS of plastic each year. You would need 2 million of these to clean up what is in the oceans now, and another 100,000 just to get the new waste. Yes. It is a stupid idea, which is why a "17 year old" came up with it.
There is a reason for that: There are 150,000,000 tons of plastic in the oceans now, and 8,000,000 tons new each year. Each trap was supposed to clean up 150,000 POUNDS of plastic each year (if it worked 100%). You would need 2 million of these to clean up what is in the oceans now, and another 100,000 just to get the new waste. This is why no one is trying anything like what he is doing. It is a stupid idea.
What's the problem? Burning for power IS recycling.
If the plastic retains 70% of it's feedstocks fuel value, and takes it 50% of the same fuel value to make into new plastic, burning is the best solution. You can measure in dollars or tons of CO2, you'll almost always get the same answer.
The problem is dozens of types of plastics. Be careful what you ask for. Some really really dumb, head up ass, cities have different recycle bins for each plastic 'recycle number'. They still don't recycle more than a tiny % into 'new plastic'. Best they can do is plastic deck 'lumber' from milk bottles. That's the 'success story'.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
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.
Another obviously stupid idea: passenger traffic by air! Using something that can barely lift one person 10 feet above ground over a distance less than 900 feet? Humbug!
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'
You would need 2 million of these to clean up what is in the oceans now, and another 100,000 just to get the new waste.
While it contributes modestly in the quantity caught, I would not discount the contribution to publicity and awareness on the subject. And the example of doing something about a problem instead of producing just talk.
Something worked once, therefor all ideas are good!
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.
You are right. Every idea is equally valid. My mistake. I forgot how Millenials think. Are you working on your hyperspace craft made out of bacon yet?
Where do you get your math? Here's theirs: https://www.theoceancleanup.co...
Clearly you 'don't want to know'...I'll tell you anyhow.
They burn it hot, mixed with natural gas and get CO2 and water out the exhaust. It is _common_.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Clearly you have never burned plastics before. Its a nasty process that releases lots of weird toxic fumes.
Depends on the temperature, pressure, and atmosphere you burn it under. A simple higher temperature, like found in an incinerator, will turn common plastic (polythene, polypropene, styrene, butadiene, acrylonitrile, ) into H2O, CO2, and N2.
In practice you get some NOx rather than N2 from acrylonitrile. And some chlorine compounds if there is any polyvinyl chloride in the mix. You can deal with both with some chemistry in the scrubbers. Some waste compounds like formaldehyde are valuable for making more plastic.
Then there's the fact that it takes LOTs of energy to burn plastics, probably more than to melt a metal with a low melting point like Aluminum.
You say it's a "fact", but it's not true. There commercial systems currently in operation that burn plastic for net energy. Holding a match under a chunk of plastic isn't the same as blowing with a gas mix in a high temperature oven.
Gasification in "waste-to-energy" plants is what gets the media excited, because it can go into modified cars. But I don't agree that it is worth the additional energy and processing. On site power generation is simpler than a gasification plant and avoids the waste in conversion, bottling and shipping.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
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.
You haven't considered your default case. It isn't some hippy renewable silliness.
Your choices are: burn new oil and use shitty plastic or burn shitty plastic and make new plastic out of oil.
Actually you first have to figure out a way to separate the plastic by chemistry, but even if you assume the hard part is done, it still makes sense to just burn the plastic.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
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.
You haven't considered your default case. It isn't some hippy renewable silliness.
Your choices are: burn new oil and use shitty plastic or burn shitty plastic and make new plastic out of oil.
Actually you first have to figure out a way to separate the plastic by chemistry, but even if you assume the hard part is done, it still makes sense to just burn the plastic.
Well I was only commenting on the two choices presented in that post which were burning it or burying it and neither requires sophisticated chemistry. My idea would be to limit the use of plastics to the absolute minimum necessary, provide incentives for industry to come up with less damaging alternatives to plastics and pressure the Asian countries responsible for these 85% of oceanic plastic pollution into cracking down on that plastic pollution. If somebody like Ocean Cleanup can then clean up a significant amount of the existing plastic pollution within a reasonable timeframe at reasonable cost then that's a project worth pursuing. As for it making sense to burn, what is it now? 15 million? tons of annually added oceanic plastic pollution instead of dumping it in the ocean, never mind burning all of the much, much, much larger amount of plastic garbage that accumulates on land annually, that only makes sense if one is some kind of deluded Trumpkin who thinks human driven thinks climate change is a Chinese hoax (hint: It isn't) because plastic in the end is sequestered carbon.
If we bury it, we pump more oil. You are not a dictator, stay on topic.
If your proposed solution involves you (or anybody else, but especially you) having that kind of power, it's a BAD idea.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
actually if you RTFA you'll see that it did. Even if it doesn't work at least he's trying to do something to help
-- Kernel Panic: Error reading
What's the problem? Burning for power IS recycling.
Plastic is made from oil. Oil is a fossil fuel. Burning fossil fuels increases the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, which causes climate change. Hence burning plastic is not a good idea. That is the problem.
-- Cheers!
well nope, not until traditional msm media dies off and media becomes actual talent based. but that would need readers to remember more than 5 years so I'm not holding my breath.
about plastic, what itches me in reporting about it is all the talk about asia and not recycling. They do recycle a fuckton of it! probably more than western countries. why? western countries can't afford people to go through trash cans sorting out plastic - whereas countries like thailand, china, vietnam etc all have that.
there's just a shitton of people here.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. -- Carl Sagan
Clearly you have never burned plastics before. Its a nasty process that releases lots of weird toxic fumes.
Depends on the temperature, pressure, and atmosphere you burn it under. A simple higher temperature, like found in an incinerator, will turn common plastic (polythene, polypropene, styrene, butadiene, acrylonitrile, ) into H2O, CO2, and N2.
In practice you get some NOx rather than N2 from acrylonitrile. And some chlorine compounds if there is any polyvinyl chloride in the mix. You can deal with both with some chemistry in the scrubbers. Some waste compounds like formaldehyde are valuable for making more plastic.
As a mechanical engineer working in the field of combustion, both are true. You may have heard the old saying, "where there's smoke, there's fire." Well, that's not really true. Where there's smoke, there's incomplete combustion. Burning organic chemicals like many plastics will reduce in to water vapor and carbon dioxide in many cases, provided the combustion is hot enough and in the presence of a catalyst. However, not all plastics are simple ethylene chains. Plastics such as vinyl have chlorine atoms that can produce toxic gases.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Why would I need it all cleaned up in 1 year? As long as there 106,667 of these then they'll be collecting all new plastic plus a little of the old. Really you only need 300,000 to clean it all up in 10 years.
The problem would not disappear. We still need to remove the plastic already there. Both removal and prevention are necessary.
Sure. But my point is not that what is there doesn't have to be cleaned up.
But if we clean it up without any mitigation on the part of those who are actually causing the problem, and those are actually responsible for the problem, they have absolutely zero reason to stop doing what they should be responsible for. Just keep blaming it on the first world.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
It's perfect.
Politicians have wet dreams associating themselves with ideals because there's really no way to fail and be held accountable.
What other alternative do you think is available to match economy?
The problem is as follows: People have mental energy. They spend it on things. When they feel they've "done their good deed", they don't do anymore until that recharges.
If they're spending all their energy on ineffective things, it's actually counterproductive: It KEEPS them from doing actually effective tasks.
Early Prius adopters in my town were a prime example. They drove terrible, because simply being in their Prius counted for good, so they could behave like asses on the road.
The Japanese were doing this back in 98 when I lived there, and dealing with the dioxins, etc. In fact, when things went wrong with the process, it was usually dioxin related to not having a high enough temperature.
Trash was sorted as Burnable and non burnable. Burnable ( paper, food scraps ) was burned. Non burnable ( plastic) was burned at a much higher temperature.
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.
However, not all plastics are simple ethylene chains. Plastics such as vinyl have chlorine atoms that can produce toxic gases.
As stated in previous post: "And some chlorine compounds if there is any polyvinyl chloride in the mix. You can deal with both with some chemistry in the scrubbers. Some waste compounds like formaldehyde are valuable for making more plastic."
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire