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20-Year-Old Thinks He Can Clean Gobs of Ocean Plastic

  

Category:  Environment/Climate

Via:  randy2  •  9 years ago  •  11 comments

20-Year-Old Thinks He Can Clean Gobs of Ocean Plastic

It started with a question: "I wondered, 'Why cant we clean this up?'" Only rather than the dinner dishes or scattered toys, "this" was referring to the world's oceans and the vast quantities of plastic with which humanity has filled them . As al-Jazeera reports, 20-year-old Boyan Slat's answer to his own question is what he calls simply the Ocean Cleanup , a pilot project he's looking to get off the ground and into the water near Japan's Tsushima island next year. The idea is to deploy a mile-plus-long barrier moored to the seabed in an area rife with plasticlonger term, Slat aims to take on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, eventually cleaning half of itand let ocean currents push trash to the barrier to be collected.

Notes Gizmodo : "These barriers arent netssea life gets tangled in those. Theyre big, V-shaped buffers anchored by floating booms." And they work because most trash is found in the top six or seven feet of water, allowing critters to pass through below. "The reason we picked that location is because the current and wave conditions are very favorable for our tests, and there really is a lot of plastic," he says. So how is a 20-year-old Dutch kid going to pull this off? His crowdfunding effort pulled down $2 million, he's got a team of about 100 scientists helping develop the project, and he's attracting some high-profile buy-in from the likes of the mayors of Tsushima and Los Angeles, and even MTV, which calls him " a 20-year-old Captain Planet. " Ahead of next year's pilot, the project will deploy 50 ships this summer to make a high-res map of plastic in the Pacific between Hawaii and California.

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Randy
Sophomore Quiet
link   seeder  Randy    9 years ago

Very, very much well worth a listening to.

 
 
 
FLYNAVY1
Professor Participates
link   FLYNAVY1    9 years ago

Unless there is an opportunity for financial gain, you can forget about corporate participation.

 
 
 
Randy
Sophomore Quiet
link   seeder  Randy    9 years ago

IYHO And in the humble opinion of Stiv J. Wilson.

 
 
 
Randy
Sophomore Quiet
link   seeder  Randy    9 years ago

He believes that re-selling the collected plastic for recycling will more then pay for the project and therefore will be profitable. Personally I don't know if it will work, but it is a very interesting concept.

 
 
 
sixpick
Professor Quiet
link   sixpick    9 years ago

Doesn't this make you sick?

1374_discussions.jpg?width=721

 
 
 
sixpick
Professor Quiet
link   sixpick    9 years ago

Unless there is an opportunity for financial gain, you can forget about corporate participation.

I hear the crap is terrible in the southern hemisphere. The should fine the hell out of the people who do this.

 
 
 
FLYNAVY1
Professor Participates
link   FLYNAVY1    9 years ago

I installed an ran a plastic recycling line about six years ago. For us, the price of virgin polyethylene and polypropylene had to be over about $1.10 a pound ($2,200/ton) for the cost of collection, washing and recycling to be cost effective. Below that we would idle the wash line that could clean 5000 lbs/hour. Right now the current price for those two resins is around .68-cents per pound ($1,360/ton).

The best thing to do with this stuff would be to collect it and burn it to generate electrical energy as sorting it out from wood scrap and trees is just going to drive up costs. Plastic has a very high BTU content and should not be wasted.

This is a breakdown of the costs/difficulties as I see it:

  1. Equipment needs to be capable of efficiently collecting this floating pile of plastic crap. A barge won't handle the seas, so it has to be a ship. The ship has to be able to collect this crap while keeping its screws and water intakes clear of this crap. (Capital cost for the ship of special design, or at least highly modified one.)
  2. The types of plastic things that are floating are not very dense, so best to shred them, or compact them. Me I would choose to compact them into bails as ultimately they are going to be burned. I think it would take less energy than shredding, and then the replacement cost of the teeth of the shredder is avoided (they are quite expensive and plastic like this is very abrasive.) (Need to add in cost for electricity to bail the compacted plastic)
  3. Cost of operation of the ship, and transit cost to and from the recovery area.
  4. The heat content of plastic is 1.4-1.5 times that of coal. Thermal coal costs today are $44.53/ton. That means that the recovered plastic scrap needs to cost less than $66.78/ton (.033-cents/pound) to compete against thermal coal in the US. It should be more competitive in places like Japan where the cost of thermal coal is higher.

It sounds like the kid wants to drag this stuff back to port somewhere. (Going to need to modify some coastal environmental laws to do that) The increased drag of towing this debris drives the cost of moving a chunk of it up in the form of fuel cost to the ship. If you don't have a cogen plant next to the waters edge, you will still need to collect and compact this stuff to ship it to a plant (more added cost)

Are you starting to get the idea as to why I'm skeptical at this point?

 
 
 
FLYNAVY1
Professor Participates
link   FLYNAVY1    9 years ago

This is decades worth of accumulation. Where are you going to start Six? Every country along the Pacific Rim has responsibility for this.

 
 
 
FLYNAVY1
Professor Participates
link   FLYNAVY1    9 years ago

And remember.... not all plastics float. What you see in your photo is mostly polypropylene and polyethylene. Plastics like styrene, nylon don't float.

 
 
 
Nowhere Man
Junior Participates
link   Nowhere Man    9 years ago
 
 
 
FLYNAVY1
Professor Participates
link   FLYNAVY1    9 years ago

I installed and ran a plastic recycling/wash line back years ago. Our break-even point was around $1.10/pound. Below that, it was better to buy virgin.

 
 

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