Wasn’t my post - just one in which I clicked on the links. The second link, if you hover your cursor over it, contains Boyan Slat’s name.
The problem is bigger than you think on the land side of things. I spend between 4 and 8 hrs on the water every weekend in Long Beach, CA and the amount of plastic trash I see in the water is astounding, and this is only local, wind blown stuff and littering. It’s not deliberate dumping, and yet I see pounds of it in just my little sphere of interaction. Plastic bags are my pet peeve and I never come home with fewer than 4 or 5 that I’ve grabbed as they float by or tangle up on my gear. If one guy in one place is seeing as much as I do, it’s not hard to believe that the total amount is in the millions of tons.
There’s been a study claiming around 60% of it is fishing industry debris:
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0111913
So rather than blaming Asian cleanliness, we should stop eating fish.
For the low, low price of $199 you can wear sunglasses made from the garbage.
Kit Pedler created the Cybermen for Doctor Who. The Plastic Eater was an adaption of one his Doomwatch scripts, apparently.
I may reveal a certain level of nerdiness here, but, as it happens, I was just yesterday reading the journal of International Molinology #90, 2015 (the journal aimed at those who study mills).
In Baltimore harbour, according to the journal, and confirmed on the internet, there exists an autonomous vessel with a water-wheel that lifts water from the surface and filters it to remove small pollutants (bottles, diapers etc). It is powered via solar and water current.
Obviously someone needs to occasionally empty the trash, but I wonder if a similar collection of vessels (presumably with fairly fine filters) could be set afloat in the gyre and left unattended?
Boombas
A water WALL*E?