In 1997, a sailor (since turned oceanographer and campaigner), Charles Moore, was traversing the ocean between Hawaii and California when he came across the now infamous Great Pacific Garbage Patch, one of the five main subtropical gyres (circulating systems of ocean currents that draw floating debris into a kind of massive junk vortex).
Ever since its discovery, there has been vigorous debate over the size of the patch, with descriptions ranging from “the size of Texas” to “twice that of France”. It is, in fact, impossible to definitively measure, because its size – and litter visible on the surface – changes with currents and winds, but its heart is thought to be around 1m sq km, with the periphery spanning a further 3.5m sq km, stretching roughly from the west coast of North America to Japan. An aerial survey last year by Dutch foundation The Ocean Cleanup found it is far bigger than previously estimated, while the UN’s environmental programme warns it is growing so fast that it is now visible from space.
Could it be hoovered up? Excluding the monetary costs, would it be possible for trawlers and ships to collect a majority of this? Also how would the detritus be contained and stored? And how could all of that, if possible, be financed?
Collecting it is not feasible. The average density is very low, a few milligrams of garbage per square meter of ocean surface area. Combine that with the wide spread, and the very limited width of the swath that any boat could skim, and your collector boats will end up having to cruise for millions of kilometers to make any significant dent; the air pollution they would release from their stacks would probably more than offset the stuff they collect.
Best bet for reduction is to stop dumping garbage into the ocean.
This. Not to minimize its significance and the problems it represents, but it’s much more a sea of dirty water than anything like a floating garbage dump.
Massive extraction ships or platforms, sort of like mechanized baleen whales filtering out the particles, is probably about the only solution. Possibly coupled with bio-safe clumping agents.
Am I stating the obvious … this is quite well known now. An awful lot of the plastics come out f Asian rivers, it seems - this is an interesting approach:
Could breed a strain of this that lives only in ocean waters, and eats the plastic garbage. Bacteria that would then serve as food for plankton, which would be eaten by fish & whales, etc.
But might be some really serious side effects, if such bacteria were to get loose worldwide. Imagine if a plastic-eating strain of bacteria were to get loose in your house? Everything from the insulation on the electrical wires inside your walls, the dishes in the kitchen cupboards – even the keyboard used for SDMB would go away!
Now worries. The Japanese are on top of this problem.
“Mincer said the study was impressive and did a good job showing that these organisms were eating the plastic pretty well. However, he said it was not immediately clear whether or not it would help keep plastics out of the ocean, for example.”
Why not use floating water filters to filter out the crap. The filters would naturally float to where the concentration of crap is highest and filter the water. Make them solar powered (so what if they only work on sunny days); sturdy to survive bad weather and put a GPS on them.
So, what exactly is a floating solar powered particulate water filter? How many millions of them would you need, and how would you keep them from killing of marine life themselves? And why would they need to be powered?
-We are talking about several MILLION square miles of ocean. It’s good that you said “filters” instead of “filter,” but the plural by itself doesn’t quite convey the scale of implementation that would be required. The devices you propose would need to be massive in number to even make a dent in the problem.
-the garbage is very, very dispersed. According to Wikipedia, we’re talking about 5.1 kilograms per square kilometer of ocean surface; each unit will have to filter a tremendous amount of water to collect even a trifling amount of junk.
-The ocean is really, really hard on man-made things. Ships need constant maintenance due to the aging effects of sun and salt water and the accumulation of marine life on underwater surfaces. Your unattended filters will soon be shredded by wind and waves and clogged with biomass.
You could spend billions of dollars on this solution, and the result would probably be regarded as a failure.
Start with the immense number of filters needed and their having to be composed of lightweight, cheap materials (i.e., plastic). Throw in losing many of them and damage to them and you’re basically adding to the problem. Not subtracting.
Start by not making it worse. A nightmare of control in itself, but if we can find a way to stoop adding to it, that’s a start.
After that, it may actually resolve itself in a manner of speaking - that is, drop out of suspension and become entombed in the sea floor, or become sequestered by any number of other processes.
Insufficiently descriptive, so not a link I clicked. Had you mentioned the kids name, or his origin, or some other identifier, I would not have made my post.