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Giant plastic catcher heads for Pacific Ocean clean-up
- ericabiz 8y agoGood. It seems like science needs more experiments and fewer naysayers. No one really knows if this will work, but it's relatively cheap ($23M--a rounding error on the scale most governments work at.) I get tired of the folks who bash experimental solutions like this (a couple of whom are quoted in this article.) Yes, there is a possibility this will harm marine life. But, unquestionably, the plastic that is already in our oceans is already harming marine life. So we need to try. This experiment will, if nothing else, provide additional data about what plastic is out there and what methods we can use to clean it up. I hope the scientific community encourages and funds more of these experiments.
- jsonne 8y ago100% agreed. Cynicism abounds, but at least they're doing something even if it fails. Embracing failure, moving fast, learning, and pivoting needs not be limited to early-stage tech companies.
- cultus 8y agoSolutions to ocean trash are well known, we just need to do them. This absolutely will fail. There is no question about that. edit: https://www.kcet.org/redefine/6-reasons-that-floating-ocean-plastic-cleanup-gizmo-is-a-horrible-idea https://www.kcet.org/redefine/6-reasons-that-floating-ocean-... https://inhabitat.com/the-fallacy-of-cleaning-the-gyres-of-plastic-with-a-floating-ocean-cleanup-array/ https://inhabitat.com/the-fallacy-of-cleaning-the-gyres-of-p... Folks, I do quantitative work in ocean conservation. I know what I am talking about here. Everyone in ocean conservation, including marine engineers, ecologists, etc, consider the Ocean Cleanup project to be misguided at best.
- baxtr 8y agoHaters gonna hate? I don’t get it. What’s wrong with preventing and cleaning? We’re enough people and there should be enough money around. Let’s just try
- cultus 8y agoThe thing is that this won't clean up anything. It is terrible for ecology, because it acts like a big net. It will kill plankton and other life. The long booms will (and have in testing) fail in storms. It also doesn't go deep enough to even collect most of the plastic. I get that magical silver hammer solutions are attractive, but this is a global problem that will take actual work to solve.
- baxtr 8y agoOk thanks for clarifying and editing your original post. It sure helps to state your credentials/knowledge in the field upfront.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- justfor1comment 8y agoThe question isn't whether we should spend money on ocean cleanup vs doing nothing. The question is whether we should give money to "The Ocean Cleanup project" or spend it on more promising research. A glitzy looking project can steal the funding from other equally promising but less glamorous initiatives.
- Endama 8y agoI wonder how the economics of this project will work considering that China has really turned down the recyclables they accept for processing. https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2018/06/28/623972937/china-has-refused-to-recycle-the-wests-plastics-what-now https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2018/06/28/6239729...
- cultus 8y agoThis project is not capable of collecting usable plastic. It is too degraded, too small. Everyone thinks there are big islands of garbage, but in fact it is distributed in small (often microscopic) particles throughout the first 100 meters of water. This project is 100% BS. I do quantitative work in ocean conservation, and I can tell you everyone just considers Boyan a scam artist.
- jessaustin 8y agoIf this effort continues, eventually the only reasonable sink for this material will be to melt everything into slugs that may be dropped to the bottom.
- HillaryBriss 8y agoBut, is there a way to keep the slugs from one day degrading into microparticles which then reenter the food chain?
- jessaustin 8y agoIt's a good question. Perhaps the answer is that we don't care about the benthic food chain? Perhaps the answer is that it will take a really long time? There's not much energy at the bottom to cause this degradation.
- dnautics 8y agoI wonder if an automated solar device that concentrates the plastic and warms the water to a few degrees above ambient would be a good way to culture and selectively enrich for bacteria capable of breaking down the plastic.
- andrewstuart 8y agoThe actual solution is to stop manufacturing infinite plastic, and stop wrapping every single thing that is sold in throwaway plastic. The idea that we can "clean it up" is the sort of foolish impossibility that the packaging industry / recycling industry / garbage manufacturing industry will latch on to to distract us from the real problem which is the never ending infinite unstoppable flow of garbage that they pour out every single day. We need to stop making garbage, not try to clean up the flow that we make. If you want to solve the "garbage world" that we now live in, start putting the blame on the packaging industry / the garbage makers.
- emtel 8y agoWell, okay, but "make the entire world stop making plastic" is not something that an individual can actually do, while "build a big ocean plastic harvester" evidently is.
- skookumchuck 8y agoPutting a tax on plastic would be a great start.
- cududa 8y agoTo reiterate the above post, that's not something an individual can do. Building an ocean skimmer is
- mreome 8y agoSo... an individual is apparently capable of constructing thousands of miles worth of marine-environment infrastructure in international waters crisscrossed by global shipping routes, managing the continuing maintenance of such infrastructure, and the logistics of collecting transportation and disposable of thousands of tons of waste... but is unable to effect political change of any kind?
- 8y ago
- Mizza 8y agoTo preempt the discussions that happen every single time this project comes up: * Being able to clean up environmental messes is more important than preventing them in the future, and they are not mutually exclusive. * The quality of the recovered plastics is lower than conventional recycled plastics, but they are sold at a premium to brands who want environmental responsibility credit. * Yes, we should prevent plastics from reaching the ocean by cleaning at the mouth of the contributing rivers - but the only reason we have identified these primary sources contributing to the ocean garbage problem is because of the research published by this same group.
- ebikelaw 8y agoCan you provide some supporting statements for your point 1(a)?
- saudioger 8y agoIt's no substitution for actual data, but there is a basic logic to it. If you're bleeding now it's more important to stanch the wound than it is to worry about avoiding future wounds (they're also not mutually exclusive conditions).
- disconcision 8y agoNot sure analogies are strictly helpful here. Like, alternatively: Say there's a knife being pulled through your guts. Should you prioritise stopping the bleeding or trying to arrest the progress of the knife? The analysis here needs to be more quantitative: what are the returns on various mitigation and cleanup methods, and what do the respective rates of change imply in terms of comparative environmental impact over a fixed period of time?
- parabx 8y ago50 > years of pollution that will maybe take millenia to clean up by themselves?
- daveFNbuck 8y ago
- cryptozeus 8y agoHere is the animation explaining how it works. Its amazing how self sufficient the system is. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=O1EAeNdTFHU https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=O1EAeNdTFHU
- pq0ak2nnd 8y agoFunny that we laugh at a flat-Earther who tries to shoot himself into orbit, but applaud this effort, when both are on equal scientific footing. https://www.forbes.com/sites/trevornace/2018/03/27/flat-earth-rocket-man-finally-blasts-off-in-homemade-rocket-to-prove-earth-is-flat/#38fdce599b6f https://www.forbes.com/sites/trevornace/2018/03/27/flat-eart...
- cultus 8y agoI work in ocean conservation, and this thread makes me sad. Anyone in ocean conservation can tell you this is BS, but sadly people in the tech industry have a tendency to discount the knowledge and opinion of experts in other fields.
- Baeocystin 8y agoI don't work in ocean conservation, but I spent my childhood in Southeast Asia, and saw very clearly how the plastic waste issue is more of a society wide garbage collection one. And having a proper waste management infrastructure would immediately improve the surrounding communities' health in addition to lessening the load on the world's oceans. Yet I find that whenever I mention this in Tech circles, it's like people don't even hear what I said, and just go back to beating the 'plastic is bad' drum. It's bizarre.
- cultus 8y agoThere's always this bizarre obsession with moonshot technological solutions to problems that are social in origin.
- mreome 8y agoPeople so fall in love of the idea of the lone young genius who did something nobody else could, and will save the world so they don't have to change any part of their life. If you bring up the logistical, scientific and technical issues with the approach this project is taking, the response is "Well at least someone is doing something." It is so incredibly disrespectful to the countless people who have devoted their lives to studying and understanding these issues, ignoring that they have been trumpeting that this problem exists for decades and proposing changes that would help.
- cultus 8y agoThis project is a borderline scam, as anyone in ocean conservation will tell you. It is completely unpractical and impossible for numerous reasons. It would also devastate ocean ecosystems. http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/05/critics-say-plan-drifting-ocean-trash-collectors-unmoored http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/05/critics-say-plan-drif...
- valar_m 8y agoDo you have another link? Because the article you linked says almost the exact opposite of what you said.
- cultus 8y agoIt has some of the main criticisms. Here's another one. http://www.deepseanews.com/2016/06/the-ocean-cleanup-deployed-a-prototype-and-i-honestly-have-a-lot-of-questions/ http://www.deepseanews.com/2016/06/the-ocean-cleanup-deploye... https://www.pri.org/stories/2017-05-30/two-proposals-clean-our-oceans-garbage-will-either-work https://www.pri.org/stories/2017-05-30/two-proposals-clean-o...
- 24gttghh 8y agoEmphasis, mine: >Slat replies that there is not an either-or solution. “We need to do both,” he says. “We need to intercept plastic before it becomes ocean plastic. And we need to clean up what is out there.” Eriksen says that plastic on the high seas is mostly lost or discarded fishing gear. Fishermen could be paid or encouraged to collect it, which he says has worked reasonably well in the North Sea. The rest will eventually break down. From your link. The last part is why we should get rid of it now, because it breaks down into the micro-plastics that marine life inevitably ends up consuming.
- cultus 8y agoBy the time it gets into these "garbage patches" it is already microscopic and distributed over the water column. What does make sense is to get fishermen to avoid losing gear. Also, trash collectors in bays and estuaries work very, very well. For example the Baltimore trash wheel. The difference is that near-shore trash collectors get it where it is highly concentrated, and before it breaks down into microplastics.
- alwaysdoit 8y agoI'm sure someone here would be happy to explain to me why this won't work, but what if we built a recycling center in the middle of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch?
- na85 8y agoIgnoring the cost of building a giant floating recycling facility and providing it with amenities required to have people work/live on it, there's the difficulty of actually keeping it intact in violent ocean Typhoons.
- HillaryBriss 8y agoyes. and, if that's not practical maybe a specialized plastic compacting ship the size of an oil tanker? it could make large bundles/cubes of plastic material which could then be transported back to land by other ships.
- mreome 8y agoThe ocean patch is hundreds of thousands of square kilometers, think 2x the size of Texas and the plastics are dispersed through the top 100m of the water column. This is an extremely thin 'cloud' of small plastic bits, not a floating island of plastic bottles. The problem with any collection-based solution such as this or the one being discussed in the article, is that the scale of the infrastructure and associated transport, maintenance, and support systems, required to actually collect a meaningful amount of waste would be far more damaging to the environment then the plastic waste itself, and would very likely introduce more waste and pollution into the environment.
- ourmandave 8y agoIt's 5 year mission... <checks size of Pacific ocean> It's 50 year mission...
- sandworm101 8y agoWant to really "solve" plastics? Warm up the crispr kits and build bacteria capable of digesting the offending plastic. There is plenty of usable emery in there for the taking. The fisher community will want your blood for destroying all the fishing nets, followed by the plastics industry as a whole. But the ocean would be cleaner.
- vinayan3 8y agoVideo on local news: https://abc7news.com/technology/first-of-its-kind-ocean-clean-up-system-to-launch-from-sf-bay-saturday/4168070/ https://abc7news.com/technology/first-of-its-kind-ocean-clea... Saturday it launches from Alameda. It will pass under the Bay Bridge at 1pm and then pass infront of the SF water front. Finally, at 2pm it will pass under the Golden Gate to leave out to sea. If anyone has a drone it'd be so cool if they could take a video of it sailing out.
- onewhonknocks 8y agoLink to Boyan's recent appearance on the JRE: https://youtu.be/J145vnEZX6w https://youtu.be/J145vnEZX6w
- dang 8y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17899395 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17899395
- justfor1comment 8y agoIdeal scalable solution to the problem: Engineering a bacteria that feeds off of plastic and can only survive in saline water. The proposed solution in this article only touches the surface of the problem, literally. Even if it pans out, the surface of the ocean will be clean and may lead to the wrong conclusion that the ocean is rid of plastic.