Giant Plastic Trap Breaks, Gets Towed Back To Land (npr.org) 142
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.
Re: leave it (Score:1)
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 ..
Re: How millennials tackle problems (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
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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.
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both have to be looked after...
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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
Re: How millennials tackle problems (Score:2)
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All? (Some is recycled here in Brazil too... Some cities here do almost all: that's not enough, not even close...)
Re: How millennials tackle problems (Score:5, Insightful)
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'.
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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'.
Mixed plastics being burned is releasing sequestered carbon into the atmosphere making the problem of climate change worse. Those are harsh environmental and climatic facts. Of the two choices presented here neither choice is a good one but burying the plastic (a.k.a. sequestered carbon) is better than burning it and releasing more carbon into the atmosphere which should have remained buried in the first place back when it was still oil. Personally, I think plastics cannot be banned quickly enough.
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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.
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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 signific
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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.
Re: How millennials tackle problems (Score:5, Informative)
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... [ecowatch.com] 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... [acsh.org]
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.
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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.
Re: How millennials tackle problems (Score:4, Informative)
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'.
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What's the problem? Burning for power IS recycling.
Clearly you have never burned plastics before. Its a nasty process that releases lots of weird toxic fumes. I don't even want to know what happens when you do it at an industrial scale but it couldn't be very *environmentally friendly*. The fumes released could be just a simple hydrocarbon, or it could contain cyanides, or PCB’s, or Dioxins or lots of other substances. Without knowing what the plastic was it would be difficult to know what are the likely volatiles it would create. Scrubbing all t
Re: How millennials tackle problems (Score:4, Informative)
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_.
Re: How millennials tackle problems (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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. [wikipedia.org] However, not all plastics are simple ethylene [wikipedia.org] chains. Plastics such as vinyl [wikipedia.org] have chlorine ato
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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."
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 s
Invented by Boyan Slat when he was just 17... (Score:1)
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.
Re:Invented by Boyan Slat when he was just 17... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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It didnt catch _any_ plastic so far
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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
How did he get the resources anyway? (Score:2, Interesting)
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
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We imagined 'greater things', now we can actually build real things.
I've known some smart kids, but never one that had an intuitive understanding of cast/benefit. You have to earn that with past mistakes. Get over loving your own ideas. 'Everything is a tradeoff' is drummed into your head in engineering school, as it should be.
Bet this boom has shed more weight of plastic than it collected, as will the next prototype.
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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.
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At least he's trying. I see nobody else try something like what he does.
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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!
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Something worked once, therefor all ideas are good!
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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
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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.
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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
Re: Dutch determination to clean up after American (Score:1)
Go ingest some mercury. You will adapt just fine
Why not put this at river exits? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Why not put this at river exits? (Score:5, Insightful)
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? (Score:5, Insightful)
That would require Americans to actually give a fuck, which clearly they don't.
It's why climate change is inevitable. Any solution which requires cooperation from Americans is doomed to fail and is simply a waste of effort and money.
FTFY.
There are also a lot of other entities that could be substituted there. You could probably boil it down to just "any solution which requires cooperation".
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Facts say otherwise. I do find some things saying USA is in top 5/10(of ocean pollution, nut specifically plastics), but provide no information on it, and feels more like FUD. (however, New York needs to stop dumping trash in ocean)
https://www.wsj.com/articles/w... [wsj.com]
https://www.usatoday.com/story... [usatoday.com]
https://www.ecowatch.com/these... [ecowatch.com]
https://www.dw.com/en/almost-a... [dw.com]
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Um, most of the plastic there comes from the West who are simply exporting the problem, and some of them do give a fuck, which is precisely why China has now refused to accept any more plastic waste exported to it from the West.
And the US is STILL by far the biggest polluter on the planet, whatever lame efforts it's made so far to change that, so suggesting the problem extends to India and Asian countries too is utter nonsense.
It's pretty clear the West at very least deserves equal blame for the problem.
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Most of the plastic is simply domestically generated in China and India. And even if plastic is imported, it becomes their responsibility.
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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?
As you can see just by the posts in here, a lot of people simply want to blame the USA.
Weird, when the problem is completely visible and undeniable to people who are rational, and can look at pictures and video and see the sources.
Rational people also understand that you don't fix problems by attacking the wrong country, something we painfully learned a few years back.
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Rational people also understand that you don't fix problems by attacking the wrong country
Oh? I thought you were the most powerful country in the world. How far you seem to have fallen.
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Rational people also understand that you don't fix problems by attacking the wrong country
Oh? I thought you were the most powerful country in the world. How far you seem to have fallen.
You're gonna have to explain that. I can't fit it into the context of what we are talking about.
Explain how reducing the US's plastic oceanic pollution is going to eliminate plastic in the ocean. If the USA didn't exist, would it have to be invented so you had something to blame it on?
I understand that I'm an idiot, but in most cases, a problem can be fixed by treating the source of the problem. Me? My way of approaching the problem is to stop it at the source. We ain't the source.
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You're gonna have to explain that.
Gladly. Shithole nations are followers in every way. We brought them technology, products, processes, and money by the bucketload. The Vietnamese who are pouring mountains of plastic into the ocean didn't invent these, they were introduced to them by western nations.
As such pointing the finger to their waste without demonstrating a suitable alternative is disingenuous. They learnt to drink from plastic bottles from us, it's up to us to demonstrate that they can live without it too.
Despite my flippant commen
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You're gonna have to explain that.
Gladly. Shithole nations are followers in every way. We brought them technology, products, processes, and money by the bucketload. The Vietnamese who are pouring mountains of plastic into the ocean didn't invent these, they were introduced to them by western nations.
As such pointing the finger to their waste without demonstrating a suitable alternative is disingenuous.
Fascinating rationale. Problem is, the alternative to just plopping the plastics into a river that ends up in the ocean has been around a while: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] . Especially that in some of these countries, labor is in ready supply, and one of the issues - that of sorting - can be largely taken care of.
They learnt to drink from plastic bottles from us, it's up to us to demonstrate that they can live without it too.
I doubt that living without plastic is practical. Recycling is practical.
Despite my flippant comment the USA still is the most powerful nation in the world. Do not underestimate the amount of influence it has on waste from these countries. And despite my comment I don't call out USA alone here. All western nations have a role to play, not the least those such as Australia who actively exported their plastic waste to they very countries which are accused of polluting the oceans with it.
We should once again become the leaders we have always claimed to be.
There seems to be an undercurrent that China buys this plastic, then dumps it. Strange business model, that. What they did do, was process plastic and paper. Did do, because they stopped https://www.nytimes.com/2018/0... [nytimes.com]
Now, between you and me and the voices in our heads, there is precious little that the US can do by itself. Or Europe. We can stop sending our recyclables to China, and do our own recycling, that's been taken care of
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Hold on a moment, are you saying that because the US introduced someone to an invention, we're responsible for it's misuse all the way down the line? If that's the case, then China is responsible for all gun violence.
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" Rational people also understand that you don't fix problems by attacking the wrong country, something we painfully learned a few years back"
Which country is that? Afghanistan? Iraq? Libya? Yugoslavia? Vietnam? The painful lessons were learned by the people living in those countries, not the attackers
Read my post - including the part you quoted.
And while you strut around like a little cock-a-whoop as if you made a point - you are doing exactly the same thing. Which ironically means you support the US attacking the wrong countries. I don't, dear coward. In any circumstance.
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Do you have any proof this is the case?
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He read a headline and not an article. Only about 20% of world plastic waste comes from rivers. However that 90% figure is still right with a caveat: 90% of plastic waste coming *from rivers* comes from just 10 rivers in the world.
Every article I've seen on this topic has the headline misrepresent this fact but gets it right in the article itself: https://www.weforum.org/agenda... [weforum.org]
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And the article talks about massive cleanup efforts in those nations.
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Yeah and? This is a good thing.
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Almost all the plastic trash going into the sea is coming from a handful of rivers in Asia & Africa.
Oh look this again. No no it doesn't. Stop reading just the headline and read TFA where you originally heard this fact. Only about 1/5th of the plastic in the ocean comes from Rivers. The 90% number is the amount of plastic that goes to the sea FROM RIVERS comes from just a handful of rivers, 8 in Asia, 2 in Africa.
To be clear 90% of 20% total is still a high number and it's well worth filtering those streams, but if you're going to be armed with facts at least get the facts right.
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Only about 1/5th of the plastic in the ocean comes from Rivers
Where is the rest of the plastic coming from?
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What? Your not going to just take his word for it? He's posted the same claim 5 times. If that doesn't make something a fact...
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He's posted the same claim 5 times. If that doesn't make something a fact...
If you counted you'd notice I didn't post 5 times. If you paid attention in several of my posts I cited the source. If you're at all willing to advance yourself rather than just post shit you'd google it and self educate on the topic too you'll very quickly come up with lots of articles all pointing to a study of waste from rivers which made the original claim that 90% of the waste *from rivers* comes from just 10 rivers and footnotes saying that makes up 1/5 to 1/4 of the total waste depending on which oth
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If it was a fact, it would have been typed in all caps.
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Where is the rest of the plastic coming from?
Err all over the place. The world has a large and damn dirty coastline, we dump a fuckton of waste from ships. Storms carry garbage from land to sea. Like it or not, we as a species are fucking grubs.
Re:Why not put this at river exits? (Score:5, Informative)
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 [wikipedia.org]) 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.
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... (the oceans are full of feces from fish).
Thanks, rest assured it's not the plastics spoiling the planned family trip to the beach.
Still early days. Reasonable 1st attempt real-worl (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
boom (Score:2)
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Ironic, like a trashcan made of recycled materials? I don't think you understand what irony is.
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no irony, tech is being developed and there will be failures. it's solvable engineering problems they face
the core idea is good and solid
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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
The post is overly negative - so are the comments (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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.
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Where do you get your math? Here's theirs: https://www.theoceancleanup.co... [theoceancleanup.com]
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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
So ... (Score:2)
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.
Seems overly complex (Score:2)
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 (Score:1)
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.
Re:what percentage of plastic (Score:5, Informative)
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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.
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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?
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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.