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Perhaps we should employ harvester vessels that collect that garbage, make something useful out of it?
by guard-of-terra 13y ago
Perhaps we should employ harvester vessels that collect that garbage, make something useful out of it?
- Crito 13y agoI suspect that the amount of sealife that you would kill while attempting to finely filter that shear volume of sea water would make doing that worse than doing nothing. Also, that plastic is really the lowest possible grade of plastic that you can imagine. I'd be surprised if it were good for even synthetic mulch in playgrounds.
- renang 13y agoI disagree. The plastic is already killing sealife and will continue to do so as long as the plastic is there. Filter the sea, maybe some creatures dies, but future generations will not be killed by plastic.
- ximeng 13y agoThis article http://inhabitat.com/the-fallacy-of-cleaning-the-gyres-of-plastic-with-a-floating-ocean-cleanup-array/ http://inhabitat.com/the-fallacy-of-cleaning-the-gyres-of-pl... argues convincingly that filtering is a distraction from reducing the amount of plastic which gets into the gyres which is the only practical way to reduce the amount of plastic.
- ronaldx 13y agoI think this is a simplification which overlooks the parent point. It seems reasonable that the gyres have always collected crap and sealife has avoided it. Now that crap is plastic. But, the gyre already provides the function of avoid-getting-killed-by-plastic, so it's not clear why we should aggressively reduplicate that effort. The garbage patch may offer benefits to the ecosystem which are not immediately obvious. Whereas, filtering is likely to damage the ecosystem in some ways. Human record of tending to the ocean has not been very good and we're not good at predicting consequences. I recommend watching documentary film "The End of the Line" http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1176727/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1176727/ before assuming that filtering is a panacea.
- guard-of-terra 13y agoThe idea is not to duplicate gyres, rather supplement those with cleanup. Gyres collect it, we harvest it on the spot.
- citricsquid 13y agoThere's a Vice documentary[1] in which reporters visit the "garbage island". The "garbage island" is not how you imagine it, it's literally an ocean of tiny broken down particles of plastic[2] invisible to the naked eye (when looking at the sea) that are in everything, including the fish. There is no way to remove the plastic through harvesting, the only option would be to filter the sea water which has its own set of problems. [1] http://www.vice.com/en_uk/toxic/toxic-garbage-island-1-of-3 http://www.vice.com/en_uk/toxic/toxic-garbage-island-1-of-3 [2] http://i.imgur.com/zLqSGsX.jpg http://i.imgur.com/zLqSGsX.jpg
- bertil 13y agoI am curious what your take would be on that effort, mentioned in a different thread: The Ocean Cleanup: http://www.boyanslat.com/plastic/ http://www.boyanslat.com/plastic/