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.

Comments

Why not put this at river exits?

[treymichaelcook]

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.

Re:Why not put this at river exits?

[Anonymous Coward]

That would require Indians and Asians to actually give a fuck, which clearly they don't.

It's why climate change is inevitable. Any solution which requires cooperation from India and Asian countries is doomed to fail and is simply a waste of effort and money.

Re:Why not put this at river exits?

[Solandri]

Feces are biological. Its constituents are chemically simple and able to be used as food by other organisms. We're just careful with where we dump human feces because they contain diseases which can rapidly spread out of control to other humans if you allow human feces to mix with open water. Insects, birds, and animals dump their feces everywhere all the time (the oceans are full of feces from fish). We don't really care about it because for the most part they don't contain diseases which can spread to humans.

Plastics are created using a natural material (oil) which some bacteria can break down and use. But the manufacturing process turns the relatively short petroleum molecules into extremely long molecules which no bacteria can break down. You have to wait for ultraviolet light (whose frequency is high enough to be ionizing) to break it into molecules short enough for bacteria can handle. That's why plastic turns brittle when left in the sun for months. The problem is it can take a very, very long time for plastics to break down to molecular lengths short enough for bacteria to consume when the polymer is tens or hundreds of thousands of CHn chains long.

The post is overly negative - so are the comments

[TheMiddleRoad]

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.

Re: How millennials tackle problems

[Ol Olsoc]

fixing the post (HTML on mobile is an adventure: no "preview"):

Recycling plastic waste. We do it here in the USA.

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.