Of course we can do both, provided we have unlimited resources and we don’t care about the damage that occurs between disposal and material finally arriving at the gyre, or anything that doesn’t happen to get there.
Is the photo headlining this article of part of an ocean? That’s part of the reason people think you could just pick out the big bits, recycle them and the problem’s solved.
One factor that the OP doesn’t seem to be taking into account is that we’re not talking about money already earmarked for ocean cleanup - people can and should use other means to control waste and collect plastic from beaches, but Boyan Slat is crowdfunding from people who normally wouldn’t be giving any money to help the issue, and in many cases didn’t know about it before. Sexiness isn’t a good basis for deciding what needs to be funded, but in this case he has managed to take an issue that many people saw as both unsexy and impossible to solve, and made it into something that people can get excited about.
I would argue that it’s likely to do the opposite: showing people that their polluting actions have serious consequences, but that there is still some hope is a long way from inviting a continuation of these actions. Even if they managed to completely clear the Pacific Gyre, there’s a lot more plastic out there that’s doing a lot of damage (and the plastic does plenty of damage on the way). Added to this, Slat is only ever suggesting that it’s economically feasible to get rid of the worst of the damage. It makes no sense at all to claim that polluting the oceans makes no difference because making a positive difference is theoretically possible. Do we keep littering because there are recycling plants and street cleaners?
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Exactly. The real problem with plastic isn’t the aesthetics, it’s the fact that it looks like edible organisms to creatures higher up on the food chain. So to any man-made mechanism cheap enough to be made in the scale needed, edible organisms are like-wise going to look like plastic.
Thanks for that, it’s very instructive to know he’s now completed what appears to be an exhaustive feasibility study that shows it would work.
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“provided we have unlimited resources”
Money that is being spent on the boy’s project, isn’t gonna magically reroute to other guy’s project, if the boy’s project stops.
“we don’t care about the damage that occurs between disposal and material finally arriving at the gyre”
For that we would need another plan that works for that segment of the problem. And then we would need to keep subdividing the problem, and solving each part until it is completely solved.
But the solution is never gonna be “wait until the problem fixes itself” or “people change their ways”, Humans will just exploit the environment until we:
1.- Invent new technology.
2.- Our culture collapses. (p.e: Maya, Rapa Nui, etc)
We’ll all die before we stop using plastics.
PS: Thanks for talking about it’s critics, I wasn’t aware of the project, today I read the summary of the feasibility study, and I’ll be donating to fund the prototype:
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One thing I find very difficult to believe is his claim that recycling the plastic will make the project pay for itself. If recycling plastic is so profitable that you can still make money when you design special equipment to collect unsorted fragments of plastic from the sea, bring it back to the US from the middle of the Pacific and process it, recycling centres must be running a complete racket if they won’t even take commercial waste without being paid.
Didn’t do much- just read the first three comments from the linked article. Something apparently the editor did not do before throwing this on the site. Scientific rigor… or something.
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I’m not completely sold on that either.
But i feel this is like Columbu’s Caravels, we won’t know which problems will he really face until he has sailed.
Take my jewelry young man!
PS: This year I’ll be drinking one less bottle of wine. But it this works, I’ll get to brag about it forever.
Except tiny bits of plastic don’t reproduce and don’t have their populations balanced between available nutrients and proximity of predators.
Also tree roots are cut whenever a tree is transplanted.
Great - analogies aside, you have a solution for filtering out tiny pieces of plastic without filtering out tiny organisms at the base of the food chain?
I suppose you could filter a great volume of oceanwater, then separate the plastics and the animals by density. This solution still has the same problems of scale as it’s still a “gadget”, but using a centrifuge or something could probably save a good deal of plankton. Some species can make very large populations very quickly from very small initial populations. Single-celled organisms are known for binary fission, but even rather complex life is quite capable of this. Just imagine how many more giant tortoises could be in the ocean if people guarded the hatchlings by repelling predatory birds, crabs etc. and supplying them with an alternate food source. This might be a great idea given exploding jelly populations.
The most effective solution would be to leverage an existing natural process. I understand that some older seaborne plastics have petrified, perhaps if there were a means of conglomerating the particles and forming them into reefs, then progress could be made toward marine rehabilitation. Of course, any given solution would be as difficult to implement as it would be to effectively demonstrate its ROI.
An entire academic discipline could be formed around ocean restoration. In addition to marine biologists, we could have experts in “ocean forestry”. Universities could be competing internationally in restorative geo-engineering. This can be a future we can live in, it just needs funding.
I think your heart is in the right place, but in practice I think you would find that plastic particles and organisms floating in similar ocean strata will share very similar densities. The sorting will never be easy, which means bulk collection and sorting may never be possible.
Not sure reading comments within that article has that much to do with scientific rigor or not… but, thanks again anyway for pointing me towards his response.
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