Pulling 20k Lbs of Plastic from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch | Hacker News Reader

Pulling 20k Lbs of Plastic from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch

smithsonianmag.com

> The cleanup installation showed promising results, but most researchers agree efforts should also be put toward preventing plastic from entering the ocean in the first place.

The Ocean Cleanup are also researching that with their 'Interceptors'.

https://youtu.be/bm1rH70wfJo

Neat. I like the name.

Eventually we'll have ocean-faring station keeping barge "interceptors". With wave glider style propulsion. https://www.liquid-robotics.com/wave-glider/overview/

Plastic will be captured as shown in video; slowly enough for critters to scoot away.

Their belly's will bail the detritus. Larger barges will collect the bounty, service the interceptors, and so forth.

Barges will have bioreactors reduce the plastics to feed stocks. Then either sell the harvest. Or pump it back into the ground (for carbon capture credits).

###

For collecting microplastics, we'll have various submersibles. Which mimic jelly fish, baleen whales, and the like. They'll rise to the surface for collection.

Submersibles will have membranes which preferentially extract plastic from water, allowing organisms to go about their way.

###

These plastic harvesters have to be simple, durable, and tenacious. Not necessarily efficient.

With a hundred thousand interceptors, jelly fish, whales slowly, tirelessly cleaning our oceans, I'm certain we can reach Ocean Cleanup's goal (remove 90% of plastic by 2040).

The scale of this depresses me. They removed 10 tons in this test, but we add 12 million tons… A year…

or they removed the amount of plastic that we add to the oceans in 14 seconds!

In their own words, the goal of this mission was not to collect plastic, but to collect data. I hope that this test will help them scale up further.

Prevention is the correct strategy to scale up, not cleaning up what someone else is dumping.

It is odd these programs do not even name where this trash is coming from.

Rivers. Which are being slowly populated by Ocean Cleanups interceptor cleaners.

Willing to bet they've used similar amount of fuel to collect that.

One of the criticisms of this device as per the article is that the critics feel that it might entrap marine life. That sounds like a reasonable criticism and is one that is refuted by the inventor saying that the ‘net’ is towed at low enough speeds and it also has various lights, escape paths etc. as mitigations but nobody seems to say either “it was zero caught so pffft to that criticism” or “yes a small amount were caught up but was it a small enough number that the benefits to species x,y,z outweigh the small amount of accidental damage” or (from the critics) “it was a fish massacre”.

I appreciate there might be technical reasons why the inventor is unable to determine the exact quantity (if any) however the absence of any quantities being mentioned at all is puzzling and either a missed opportunity to ‘slay the nay-sayers’ or is something they would rather not mention.

In fairness there may be an exact figure available somewhere out there but wasn’t something a quick dig through the first few pages of search results revealed.

If you compare to wind turbines, the scale of the potential harm is small enough that it takes proper scientific investigation to say whether it is a problem, and whether any particular attempt to improve things is helping.

Easy enough to make claims, but they're worthless without the science to back them up.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com