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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.
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.
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.
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.
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