SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the have-you-tried-not-putting-it-in-in-the-first-place dept.
Ocean Cleanup Device Shows It Can Remove Plastic From the Pacific:
It's been nearly a decade since Boyan Slat announced at age 18 that he had a plan to rid the world's oceans of plastic.
Slat, now 27, is a Dutch inventor and the founder of the Ocean Cleanup, a nonprofit that aims to remove 90% of floating ocean plastic by 2040.
That goal has often seemed unattainable. The Ocean Cleanup launched its first attempt at a plastic-catching device in 2018, but the prototype broke in the water. A newer model, released in 2019, did a better job of collecting plastic, but the organization estimated that it would need hundreds of those devices to clean the world's oceans.
Scientists and engineers began to question whether the group could deliver on the tens of millions of dollars it had acquired in funding.
But over the summer, the organization pinned its hopes on a new device, which it nicknamed Jenny. The installation is essentially an artificial floating coastline that catches plastic in its fold like a giant arm, then funnels the garbage into a woven funnel-shaped net. Two vessels tow it through the water at about 1.5 knots (slower than normal walking speed), and the ocean current pushes floating garbage toward the giant net.
In early August, the team launched Jenny in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a trash-filled vortex between Hawaii and California. The garbage patch is the largest accumulation of ocean plastic in the world, encompassing more than 1.8 trillion pieces, according to the Ocean Cleanup's estimates.
Last week, Jenny faced its final test as the organization sought to determine whether it could bring large amounts of plastic to shore without breaking or malfunctioning. The Ocean Cleanup said the device hauled 9,000 kilograms, or nearly 20,000 pounds, of trash out of the Pacific Ocean — proof that the garbage patch could eventually be cleaned up.
"Holy mother of god," Slat tweeted that afternoon, adding, "It all worked!!!"
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 22 2021, @10:32PM (4 children)
Most plastic is bouncy neutral meaning there is a column of plastic to clean at many sizes ranging from micro to macro.
Otherwise, you are just skimming the surface of some big chunks.
Also, the plastic is not clean, it is mixed with biomass from algae and critters.
So will be very heavy to get into any land processing station, stink like shit and require a lot more energy and fresh water to recycle than it is worth.
Also, what is the energy needed to clean just 1 patch?
Are we going to burn a lot of fossil fuel to get the job done?
Also, the scale is obviously still a big issue that is only getting bigger moving into the future.
Like a Red Queen Race.
"Well, in our country," said Alice, still panting a little, "you'd generally get to somewhere else—if you run very fast for a long time, as we've been doing."
Good Luck with that.
Maybe focus on replacing plastics with something that can degrade back into the environment without toxins or giving Men tits? (Phthalates mimicking estrogen)
Just a suggestion.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 22 2021, @11:35PM
Sure, but I'm a lot more worried about the minority of plastic that is bouncy evil.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 24 2021, @02:48AM
At the speed this thing moves at wind power is highly attractive, and unmanned vessels can support very long deployment times. Windmill ships aren't exactly cheap to build but should be cheap enough to operate. Once the nets are proven to work then they would be a logical upgrade. Sail ships for back-haul is another option, since waste isn't exactly a time sensitive cargo. One collector obviously isn't nearly enough, but if you can build one you can build hundreds, and mass production should reduce cost-per-unit as well.
Most plastic isn't recyclable and what gets dumped is often picked over first. Even if it wasn't, sorting fragments is also highly unlikely to be viable. Sun drying before shipping back to shore would both reduce weight and odour, but the end game is likely using it as fuel. Dry biomass burns so cleaning isn't an issue for that use case. Not a great outcome, but better than leaving all that plastic in the ocean.
Even if we stopped dumping plastic in the ocean today it would still take at least 500 years for what is there to break down, and that is probably optimistic. I fully agree that we need sustainable alternatives, but cleanup is still needed.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Sunday October 24 2021, @04:03AM (1 child)
Recycling isn't really an option after that much sun exposure anyway. Realistically, the options for disposing of all but the highest-quality current-gen plastics are
1) landfill, where it becomes some future person's problem, but at least isn't leaving an ongoing chain of ecological damage in its wake until then.
2) incineration. A well designed an incinerator can burn plastic and dried biomass almost as cleanly as any other fuel, and you can harvest the energy - I think I've heard Germany actually produces a lot of it's electricity through waste incineration, importing trash for recycling and incineration from many of its neighbors.
Eventually something like the newer acid-recyclable monomer plastics may catch on and change things, but for now the whole idea of plastic recycling has always been a greenwashing scam by petrochemical companies. Technically it can be done, but you lose quality with every go-round, and even at the highest quality levels it only just barely makes financial sense to do so.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 24 2021, @08:41PM
I don't know about Germany, but Sweden has such a program. It isn't great, but it works out to being the most economical and least polluting solution in the near term. Reducing plastic use, especially single use plastics, makes the biggest difference but actually recyclable plastics would be a big help as well.
Reduce, reuse, recycle, and recover. Apply in that order. But for some reason recycling is the only one that gets any attention, even at the expense of the other three.