First 100k KG Removed from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch
theoceancleanup.com
theoceancleanup.com
And, it wouldn't be. But if they can work out how to make the things reliable and affordable, deploying 10 of them that are each 10x bigger gets the patch cleaned up in 8 years. Provided we are not dumping that much in at the same rate.
I used to think that recycling plastic was dumb, because plastic in a landfill is carbon nicely sequestered. But apparently making new plastic burns several times that amount of carbon. So, even if the petroleum that would have been made into new plastic is instead cracked and burned for fuel, you still come out ahead by reusing it.
KG is metric and universal in most countries.
Are there any places where Imperial Ton is still being used?
When you are talking about garbage, tons is the familiar unit. Metric or Imperial, it doesn't matter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_garbage_patch#Si...
So with System 03 they would need to do 100 missions (and the missions take maybe a year?) but if they had funding for ten of these deployments and ran them simultaneously then the problem would be gone in 10 years (after complementary measures are taken to prevent the patch from growing).
I wonder if the International Maritime Organization could mandate that all fishing gear be marked with unique barcodes, and require countries to check that all boats heading out into international waters have recorded those barcodes against their ship registrations in a global public log. The biggest political problem with that would be allowing other countries to do inspections to ensure compliance.
Still I'm glad someone is doing something, perhaps this will spur more parties to help.
Mega seconds ....
Kilowatt-hours... (When the closest SI unit of energy is the megajoule)
Km/hour... (When the closest SI unit of velocity is m/s)
All failures of the SI system.
Why on earth are we pulling ~100s of kg while there is still 8.8 million tonnes entering the ocean each year?! [1]
aka Ocean Bound Plastic, I've seen a few products use it (but I don't know how to go about certification): https://www.hermanmiller.com/en_apc/better-world/sustainabil...
How much (by weight) is plastic? How much is seaweed? How much is ocean water which is stuck in the plastic now?
Things like a 1 gram bag could easily get 100 grams of weed growing on it, which absorbs 1kg of water. It's now very difficult to weigh that 1 gram which is now only 0.1% of the total mass.
It's also not obviously clear that removing the weed-covered bag from the environment is a good plan, if you're removing 100 grams of biomass for each gram of plastic removed.
Second question: do you have some prior knowledge in this area that informs your opinion?
Some types of weed entangle like spaghetti with one-another so just grabbing one corner and pulling means you can haul a few hundred kilos of weed into a boat by hand.
Most floating garbage gets covered in weed, shells, and even a few small fish or corals pretty quick. I really don't see how the garbage could be separated without destroying the weed and ecosystems attached.
Doing it at scale without some research to be sure it's the best plan seems like a really bad idea.