FSTDT Forums
Community => Science and Technology => Topic started by: the_ignored on September 14, 2013, 01:11:03 am
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Why can't I come up with ideas like this (http://www.trueactivist.com/ingenious-19-year-old-develops-plan-to-clean-up-oceans-in-5-years/)?
It's summarized below, with a later link to the project's site.
To this avail, it was 19-year-young Boyan Slat that ingeniously created the Ocean Array Plan, a project that could remove 7,250,000 tons of plastic from the world’s oceans in just five years.
Slat’s idea consists of an anchored network of floating booms and processing platforms that could be dispatched to garbage patches around the world. Working with the flow of nature, his solution to the problematic shifting of trash is to have the array span the radius of a garbage patch, acting as a giant funnel as the ocean moves through it. The angle of the booms would force plastic in the direction of the platforms, where it would be separated from smaller forms, such as plankton, and be filtered and stored for recycling. The issue of by-catches, killing life forms in the procedure of cleaning trash, can be virtually eliminated by using booms instead of nets and it will result in a larger areas covered. Because of trash’s density compared to larger sea animals, the use of booms will allow creatures to swim under the booms unaffected, reducing wildlife death substantially.
More details here (http://www.boyanslat.com/plastic5/).
So...anyone see any flaws in this? Other than that this site also endorsed Dr. Wakefield? (Yes, THAT Wakefield...do a search on his name, and yes, that isn't really relevant, but it does show that as a science site, this may not be a good one!) That's why I looked for other articles, which I linked to.
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I was worried about the costs but they claim that this might even be profitable.
Which would be amazing since the cost is the biggest reason why the great floating trash collections haven't been cleaned yet.
I don't know how well it would really work but even if it would break even or cost some money I would still support it. Even if it's supported by Wakefield. Even if the ghosts of Kim Jong-Il, Hitler and Stalind would show up and voice their support for this I would still support cleaning the oceans.
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Some portion of the garbage rift objects are quasi buoyant, in that they do float, but below the surface, all the way down to 40 meters on average. By adding a few venturi air nozzle pipes, that portion of the plastic mass could be drawn up to be swept between the surface collection booms. Also, I'm wondering on both the feasibility and need, frankly, for recycling the salvaged plastics. They will be in poor shape physically, chemically degraded, some pieces are quite tiny (the most harmful - fish ingest them accidently) and the cost versus return would be quite poor, even if the entire operation is PV/wind powered. It may even run at a bad loss. Just collect the crap, get shipping companies to do tax write-off hauling jobs of it back to shore, and it can then be processed into concrete mixes and road paving aggregate.