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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'
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
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