Re:The Oceans' Plastic Garbage Patches

With an estimated 15,915,933 sq. km. it seems a very large task.

THE GARBAGE PATCH IN THE OCEANS - The Fu ...

It took a long time to get to the point it is now,and it will take a long time to clear

it,even when a method is found.

Difficult does not mean impossible.

When you have to eat an elephant,it is easy if you do it one bite at the time.

I just heard about a German company that recycles plastic waste into road surfacing material that is more durable than asphalt. Now if we could combine the two, it would be killing two birds with one stone.

Yeah! Then we could just pave over the garbage patch.

In Netherland too they use plastic waste for roads.Dredging sea and collecting, compacting, melting garbage is very good idea.

Once it enters the food chain it's only a matter time before we end up eating it all......so.....bon appetit

Mining it as a resource crossed my mind too.

Problem with that is there's still plenty of it available on land.

One day maybe.

Exactly, right now (and into the foreseeable future as we keep opening up 'new Natural Gas deposits by fracking), there is no ROI on 'Gyre Plastic.' You'll get less for it than you spend recovering it.

One more reason to hate Fracking: it's making oceanic cleanup unprofitable, and there impossible for any agency that would have the funds and assets to do the job, since no for-profit corporation will do anything that will not make money in the 'medum-run.' (Corporate 'long-run' isn't really that long, otherwise they'd be considering end-of-product-life issues when designing a product, and looking at environmental impacts seriously.)

The only thing I can concieve of as being possibly feasible is a current-driven collector,being propelled by the same forces that created the Gyres.

An autonomus net-dragging mechanism that would collect the debri into a net,and send a sat signal when it was full and needed emptying.

I have no idea how to build such a machine,I can merely suggest in general terms the basic idea..perhaps there are some naval engineers willing to tackle this problem.

I am sure there would be capture of some of the animals in the food chain,but they are doomed anyway if they eat the plastic,and this would be a temporary problem, unlike the plastic waste that could go on forever.

So, your solution to the problem is to sink the debris to the ocean floor???

This may protect the surface animals but will destroy the bottom dwellers...

People will be happy because the problem will have disappear!

No, the solution is to stop the industrial scale dumping of waste at sea.

Have the United Nations pass a useful international law for once. Any ship found dumping garbage is to be sunk without rescuing the crew arrested and force the crew swim to the nearest work camp where they will pick up all the little plastic pieces on the beach to trade for a few grams of food per day. Of course, the ones who financed the dumping operation need to be arrested as well and be given the same treatment even if they are "respected" politicians or rich industrials...

I just got off the phone with the UN in New York City.

They said they'd begin debate on your law on Monday.

They said they'd have it ready to enact within two weeks, and enforce a month later.

They said to have you send an initial payment of $34,765,000,00 USD to cover debate and enactment of "Marcot's Law".

That will get one 100 foot patrol boat and 10 men for a year. Food, guns, bullets and fuel are still needed.

That should do the trick nicely, don't you think?

The UN is a toothless shadow agency.

The oceans are immense, as was demonstrated by disappearance of, and the search for, the Malaysian 777 that disappeared.

I agree with you but someone has to propose it. Would you split the tab with me?

Anyway, the UN has lots of budgets to conduct useless projects, so they can manage.

As for the fleet, the mandate would be given to all the boats on the sea, just like rescuing distress vessels. Military and civilian vessels would at least report and document these illegal dumping.

I agree more needs to be done.

What is needed is a biodegradable packaging material to replace all the poly-everythings already in use.

Or, we could all go back to brown paper bags.

That would work! But a whole industry would be destroyed and the final cost (to us) would be higher.

We will have to split the bill one way or the other

You and I aren't the problem. I would pay more.

Even the USA could mend its ways.

It's the other 800 pound elephants of the world who don't care.

Even states here in the US can't agree.

Case in point: we have a summer house in Minn. by a lake. The other side of the lake is South Dakota where they are proposing a 4,000 head cattle operation. The waste will drain into a creek that flows into our lake. (Oh, they'll have holding ponds for the $hit)

Now, Minn. would never allow the operation to be built. S.D. said, "Come on boys, build, build, build".

It's all about money.

What about the debris generated by tsunami and other natural disasters, as you know Mother Nature is a major contributor to pollution....

Tsunami debris from Japan has reached California where nobody want to touch it due to fear of radiation. But floating garbage has not reached the shore.

The problem is not ships dumping plastic waste at sea.

True, that lost nets and fising tackle are part of the problem,but only a small part,that

gets a lot of press because it harms a lot of large prey.

And that is a terrible thing,to cause suffering to another creature due to carelessnes

or neglect.

The real problem is the people that have become accustomed to a throw-away society.

The beaches are littered with plastic containers that eventually are carried out to sea by the tides.

The rivers carry debri from all of the cities to the sea.

The highway litter that is blown into the waters by wind or carried there by flooding.

People are used to throwing things away.They do not realize that there is no "away".

It all stays right here on our home planet.

And as I stated,the planet does not care what we do.

The planet does not pass a moral judgement.

It will only affect the inhabitants,not the planet.

And it is we who must make corrections for our own benefit.

If we simply stopped adding to the debri,in a few hundred years the oceans would

cleanse themselves of our trash,and it would end up on the bottom of the

oceans,forming a thin layer of anthropological history that would reflect the ignorance

of our present time.

As someone else stated,it is all about $$$.

If there was a significant profit to be made by recycling the oceans' plastic,someone

would be doing it already.

If you can show a business plan that will give a 5 year return on investment,nearly

any bank will finance it.

Anyone have a valid detailed plan?

I agree wholly with you. Anything we do here on earth will only be a "temporary fix". We as humans are an arrogant lot. We think we know how to fix the world by challenging nature. Nature as we know it cannot be outwitted. At least the idea of cleaning up the environment may be a noble cause, it will create jobs and that is all we can hope for as long as we are alive. An unknown cataclysm will appear out of no where and negate anything we thought was life. There are those who think there is alien life out there. No one can present any proof for or against. I think people are just looking for a cause to embrace. As long as it makes them happy, who am I to burst their bubble. I'm 80. Soon I may be able to learn the secrets of the universe. When I do, I'll come back and let you know.

Presumably this stuff moves about driven by currents and winds. So rather than go fishing for plastic that is too low a density to make collecting it practical, get the plastic to come to you. Deploy ten/forty nuclear powered buoys over a fifty/two hundred mile front with a drift net linking the buoys. Make the mesh of the net so fine that it won't catch fish. Use the powered buoys to hold the net in a stationary location based on GPS. Wait for the winds and currents to drive the plastic into the nets and when the density gets high enough to be commercial send a vessel across the front of the nets scoping up the plastic for recycling. The up front costs are high but after that it becomes self financing and all the technology already exists, it is just a matter of using it in a different way.

Wouldn't it be cheaper to just pay somebody to clean it up ?

Based on the data provided by Lyn (#1) there is on average roughly 2.5kg/km² so if a ship could be equipped to sweep a 250 metre wide channel with 100% efficiency, it would need to travel 1600km for every ton it scooped up. Assuming of course that the plastic will stay put while the ship sweeps in a grid pattern. In the unlikely event that 100x that density would concentrate in front of a two hundred mile net, only 2.5 tones would be scooped up for every 200 mile (320km) pass.

Done the maths. Scrap the idea for buoys and nets. Back to the drawing board.

But Lyn's average data does not represent the areas of HUGE plastic density. Picking the "worst" areas will provide the "best" yields ranging up to 100kg per square kilometre. See the data from this peer-reviewed article:
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0111913

Download and inspect Figure S2. Then recalculate for your proposed 250 metre sweep width. Distance traveled per tonne is not your 1600km estimate, it is just 40km.

Picking the low hanging fruit gives huge yields - AND in the gyres there are mechanisms that continually sweep plastics into the high density regions, to feed the low hanging fruit picker.

Fruit is still lower and easier to pick at the source. Land based polyeverything ore is there for easy picking.

This idea was originally conceived to clean up oil slicks. Two tugs tow a barge that collects and processes the contamination. The tugs are positioned at 30º off each side of the bow of the barge so that the tow lines form a V. In the case of oil the tow lines are floating booms, for plastic they would be drift nets. The contaminant rolls along the boom/nets and concentrates at the apex of the V where it is scooped up. For oil the tugs are typically 150-250m from the barge which cleans a channel 150-250m wide. For plastic you might try 1Km tows to give a 1Km wide channel, it depends on the drag imposed by the nets, the power of the tugs and the weather conditions. The data we are all quoting was collected with nets with a 0.33mm mesh which is why they don't trap fish, but do impose tremendous drag. So far so good, now for the maths. Average price obtained for mixed plastic last month in the UK was £91/tonne ($142, €128). This is down about 8% on the previous year as more recycled plastic becomes available the price drops. This initiative would generate enough capacity to cause prices to collapse. To hire an ocean going tug, with crew, is typically £8350/day ($13000, €11750). Lets say half that for the barge, so total operating costs of £21000/day ($32700, €29600) I think it is high but I am going to guess that you can tow at 8Km/hour, round to 200Km/day. Without taking into account the two/three day journey to get to the concentrations of plastic, and the two/three day journey to return to port, you need a plastic density of 1.1tonnes/Km² collected 24hrs/day, with no weather interruptions, just to break even. Factor in a typical endurance for tugs of 18 days and the figure rises to 1.5tonnes/Km².

Conclusion. As an economic proposition it will not work. As an inter-government funded environmental clean up program, no politician who wants to be re-elected is going to back this.

I already proposed a solution to collecting and processing plastic waste in the oceans and was shot down as being impractical and too expensive. As I recall, it was a vessel that would troll the oceans; collecting plastic waste. It would operate the same as a tuna factory ship and would remain at sea continuously. The waste would be off-loaded to another ship to be disposed of in port. A fleet of ships can be assembled from surplus ships from the mothball fleet for less than what it costs to build a super aircraft carrier.

As a retired naval architect, I know this is a possible solution. It would only take a few millionaire financiers to make this possible. This is not rocket science. Everything needed is available off the shelf. I know politics will rear it's ugly head and cause such a project to go over budget and there are those who want to make their name.

This could be a great project for someone like Donald Trump. If he could pull it off, it would secure his place in history.

Another element of trash is aluminum cans which can also be reclaimed as long as they don't sink, but even if they do, a means of reclaiming them from the briny deep can be found. Again, this is not rocket science, but straight forward engineering that a recent graduate can figure out.

Remember the ship that was secretly converted and fitted out to salvage a sunken Russian sub? I worked on part of that project and all it took was basic engineering skill and some imagination.

Never say something is impossible when that person is doing the impossible. If I had the backing, I would come out of retirement and make it happen.

if collected plastics are melted into bricks in the factory ship and sent to land by another vessel it could be used to pave roads like asphalt.

This is already done and has been done for the past 20 years by the U.S. Navy. Navy ships compact and melt their plastic waste into round disks about 25 mm thick. It is stored on-board until they reach port where it is then off-loaded to a shore facility. I think cruise ships may be doing the same, but they may be just storing it in compressed bails.

Tell every teenager on the planet not to touch any of that plastic.

Do not dare bring it to a landfill.

Do not get caught with any of it on your person.

Make it illegal to posses any of the debri.

Then sit back and watch it happen.