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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Very, very much well worth a listening to.
Unless there is an opportunity for financial gain, you can forget about corporate participation.
IYHO And in the humble opinion of Stiv J. Wilson.
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.
Doesn't this make you sick?
I hear the crap is terrible in the southern hemisphere. The should fine the hell out of the people who do this.
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:
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?
This is decades worth of accumulation. Where are you going to start Six? Every country along the Pacific Rim has responsibility for this.
And remember.... not all plastics float. What you see in your photo is mostly polypropylene and polyethylene. Plastics like styrene, nylon don't float.
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.