Not bad thinking, but I expect you will run into problems with scale given that your proposed system needs to give the microorganisms time to migrate; the volume/time requirement means that processing cubic kilometers of ocean would take a massive facility.
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A big facility you say? Perhaps ocean sized. What if we blot out the sun Mr. Burns style over the plastic filled eddy in the middle of the ocean? muwuhahahahahaha
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It seems like it wouldnât need to, what with coral reefs not being in the deep sea.
Considering of course that the worldâs oceans contain about 1.3 billion cubic kilometers of water with the plastic distributed through a sizable fraction of it.
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How much of the world has easy access to recycling programs? How many people and business pay attention? How much of the plastic is there unintentionally?
Iâve seen this and similar pictures used by the media to illustrate what it looks like. Thanks ignorant reporters.
So this is one of the harder-to-solve threats to the oceans. But is it one of the more dangerous threats, compared with overfishing, carbon dioxide pollution/acidification, or the Australian government? I think in some sense it makes sense to focus one threats which are more urgent, more dangerous, and/or more easily solved.
I donât understand why we arenât mining this plastic out of the ocean. I have a plan for refining it, and everything - Iâm just not well funded enough to do anything about it.
That sounds very plausible. Too bad plausible sounding BS isnât actually as good as the right answer in technical fields.
https://scripps.ucsd.edu/news/1847
Good luck with that law degree. Now are there any people who actually have the facts of the situation that can answer the question?
I love the implication that the guy is in the middle of the Pacific with his deep sea canoe.
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Recycled plastic is worth approximately bupkis on the secondary market. The cost of separating out the microscopic particles from seawater is many orders of magnitude higher than what you would get by selling it, even if it werenât a mishmash of every kind of plastic heavily contaminated by its life in the sea.
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I dunno about you, but MY interstate is teaming with islands of microscopic convicts.
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The imprisonment of innocent micro-organisms is only the tip of the iceberg. American culture and corporate advertising promote the use of âdisinfectantsâ which kill micro-organisms without even a pretense of due process!
It would be useful to actually try to do this in an enclosed environment, and see what happens with regards to the sealife. Take a large container of ocean surface water, dump it in a tank, and then try some proposed filtering method.
My assumption is that the effects on the sealife will be minimal. Youâre not going to scoop up all the sealife (just as you wonât actually filter out all the plastic, of course), and what remains will most likely rapidly breed themselves back to their former density in, what, weeks? Months?
Filter again in six months or a year. Allow the population to strengthen again. Filter again, etc.
As weâve seen with several fish conservancy projects, populations can rebound. Much more so if theyâre tiny and have short lives.
Clearly I havenât studied the problem in depth, but the article seems to just assume that catching organisms is de facto bad, without question whether, a year forward, the life that remained will be happier and healthier with the plastic removed.
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I think it is. Because the plastic is inserted into the food chain. Which means eventually youâll eat it.
Non sequitur. First, why does that make this more urgent than the other threats? Second, why would inserting plastic in the oceanic food chain, especially given that Iâm concerned about overfishing, mean that Iâd eat it?
Assuming you were successful⌠Where do you put it all? I donât mean the plastic, but the water.
You now have an arbitrarily large quantity of plastic-free seawater. If you put it anywhere but the ocean it came from, you either have to replicate the living conditions of the fauna you were trying to save or you accept having to kill the fauna you were trying to rescue in the first place.
Putting it back isnât an option either, as it will simply be contaminated by plastic in very short order.
Worse yet, even if you did this on a truly enormous scale â see 1.3Bn cubic kilometres of water â youâd end up not with areas that are plastic-free and others still contaminated, but with a somewhat diminished concentration in the oceans as a whole.
Thereâs some kind of problem going on here, sure. So letâs frame the problem in the narrowest possible way, so that changing anything seems insurmountably difficult.
I offer an alternate frame to this one: The fracking boom is making plastic even cheaper to produce, the petrochemical industry is building new plants, more capacity to make more plastic that will eventually end up in the water.
The way I see it, we donât have a problem with âlitter on the groundâ, so much as we have a problem with an economic/political system unable to adapt to changes in the environment.
Address the issue with the political/economic system, and weâd be in a position to cope witgh this and hundreds of other, related problems.
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Iâm going to catch hate for this, but⌠How about some sort of genetically engineered micro-organism that can metabolize the plastic? Yeah, ecological implications of introducing an organism into an ecosystem are COMPLICATED, but if the plastic is a real problem, it could be the only real solution.
Thereâs some already eating it. The plastic ends up on beaches too, broken down by wave action. The gyre has a half life. Of all our problems, this is a small one.
