Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch Worries Researchers 296
NeverVotedBush writes with an update to a story we discussed early this month about an enormous accumulation of garbage and plastic debris in the Pacific Ocean, a thousand miles off the coast of California. The team of scientists has now returned from their expedition to examine the area and say they "found much more debris than they expected." The team will start running tests on the samples they retrieved, and they are preparing to visit another section of ocean they suspect will be full of trash.
"The Scripps team hopes the samples they gathered during the trip nail down answers to questions of the trash's environmental impact. Does eating plastic poison plankton? Is the ecosystem in trouble when new sea creatures hitchhike on the side of a water bottle? Plastics have entangled birds and turned up in the bellies of fish, and one paper cited by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimates 100,000 marine mammals die trash-related deaths each year. The scientists hope their data gives clues as to the density and extent of marine debris, especially since the Great Pacific Garbage Patch may have company in the Southern Hemisphere, where scientists say the gyre is four times bigger. 'We're afraid at what we're going to find in the South Gyre, but we've got to go there,' said Tony Haymet, director of the Scripps Institution."
Re:Overreaction (Score:4, Interesting)
Considering that the bottom of the food chain resides in said "thin layer" (and much of the top of the food chain feeds there) the potential impact is magnified well beyond its volumetric measure.
They say it's approximately twice the size of Texas. Texas is 691,030 square kilometers. So twice the size of Texas is 1.4 million square kilometers. The world's oceans cover approximately 361 million square kilometers. So an area TWICE THE SIZE OF TEXAS (oh noes! Panic!) is 1/3rd of a percentage point of the surface area of all the world's oceans.
Resource Storage (Score:4, Interesting)
The 'plastic' waste modern man produced could be seen as a resource storage.
We're burning up a lot of the petroleum resources. Which means it goes away. Gone, not available in the future.
The portion of the petroleum that we're turning into plastic is being preserved in that form. A century from now people might be saying 'thank goodness they saved SOME of the petroleum in the form of all that plastic in the landfills and floating in that big mass on the ocean.' And then they may go on to curse the 'environmentalists' who forced industry to stop using plastic bags and containers. All the 'biodegradable' packaging just crumbled away.
Not saying this is a completely thought out notion, but it makes some sense.
Tear into it if it conflicts with your religion.
Re:Gigantic Building Projects (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:This is not complicated. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Overreaction (Score:5, Interesting)
You mean worse than oh say, FISHING?
Seriously, filtering the top 6 inches of water, even going so far as to remove anything bigger than .5 micron shouldn't be such an impossible task, I'm envisioning a boat with a wide modified bow that collects the bow wave for filtering.. perhaps a group of them in an arrow formation filtering thier way back and forth across the gyre. Heck done right they could burn the plastic as fuel, capture the co2 in the sea water to help the phytoplankton recover.
As to to the depletion of the microorganisms in that layer, if the plastic is THAT deleterious we are likely doing the species(s) a favor by removing the badly damaged members, freeing up the space for healthier members to reproduce.
Oh just fucking burn it (Score:4, Interesting)
If you burn the plastic and debris at a high temperature the emissions are relatively small. Burn it and put the exhaust through another filter to catch whats left. Hell you could probably power the ship from the incinerators.
Too bad plastic is cheaper to make than it is to reclaim. Otherwise someone would have scooped it all up and made it into milk jugs by now.
Re:This is not complicated. (Score:3, Interesting)
Great Idea! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Earth Plus Plastic. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Gigantic Building Projects (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Gigantic Building Projects (Score:3, Interesting)
Not quite the way to go. You build your siphon feeder, and you design it to run on solar, nuclear, or, if you can figure out how, plastic. It accumulates the gunk until it's got several cubic yards of the stuff, presses it together, and then heat it until it fuses. In the process you shape it so it has a convenient tow ring. Then you attach a rope (possibly also fused from plastic) to it and toss it overboard. A tug pulls up, picks the rope from your deck, and lugs the stuff to a recycling center on land.
I doubt the process would pay for itself, but it might come close, over time. And it would be an on-going project, designed to process the stuff just slightly faster than the area grew.
Re:Watch conservatives spin it... (Score:2, Interesting)
Because you insult those that disagree with you by implying that they are incapable of thinking for themselves.
Also, if he had just posted that I probably wouldn't have respected his comment. Granted, there probably are scammers among the carbon credit sellers. However, if you buy up some land and plant an orchard, that's a legitimate carbon sink (the trees themselves) which will also turn a profit.
I trust that sort of thing a lot more than the average venture capitalist. But that's why, if I were to buy a carbon credit, I would do something along the lines of finding a golf course and turning it into an orchard, or just a forest.
And I don't think than many environmentalists are honestly arguing that carbon credits are a solution. Environmentalism boils down to reduce, reuse, recycle. Corporations can take their greenwashed overconsumption and shove it up my ass.
Yes it would (Score:2, Interesting)
"Would need some sort of high-volume filtration system."
Yes it would, and wouldn't that be an extremely intertesting bit of technology to develop? Right off the bat if they first developed a way to get the plastic to reclump together, then the filter, then be able to further refine it, it could be a very lucrative oceanic mine for decades, like has been mentioned, get some fishermen and sailors back to useful work. And similar high volume filtration tech might be used for another example say in cleaning up fresh water sources better, or to be part of waste water treatment plants. We already have filtration systems for this or that, but to develop something that could work on that sort of scale could very well be some important tech down the road. And like was pointed out, being plastic, this could help develop interest in larger scale energy plants that could use the stuff, including th..terraforming isn't the word, aquaforming? Huge floating energy conversion barges. Or just concentrate it back down so it could be used for..manufactured plastic goods. I don't see the need for plastics going away anytime soon, nor the need for more forms of energy. And we need *work* for millions and millions more people planet wide every year, something useful.
A lot of times I think we humans might be better off just with a 180 attitude adjustment, instead of always looking at things as problems, if we just looked at them as opportunities, it might make solutions appear easier and work better. The old saw of how to look at things, the glass half full or half empty deal. Turn the "Oh, noes!!" into the "Hot Damn!"s.
Re:Oh just fucking burn it (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm in favour of some large nuclear explosions. Those would probably break up the plastic.
Re:Earth Plus Plastic. (Score:3, Interesting)
Your post just makes me laugh. Ever considered being a straight man?
Maybe you just haven't heard the right comedians before. It's not all dick jokes and "you just might be a redneck" jokes. George Carlin was of course one of the true geniuses of our time. Pointing out the absurdities of life and still being able to sleep at night takes a truly great comedian.
Re:Are you going to believe your eyes, or our stor (Score:2, Interesting)
Are you really skeptical that the NOAA is "scientific"?
After reading the GP's reply to this, yes. Thanks for prodding him into smacking your presumptive ignorance down.
Science is a methodology, not on organization acronym. When the NOAA actualy performs science, thats great! When they don't, but people like you still believe them hook line and sinker, that fucking sucks for everybody.
Re:Overreaction (Score:4, Interesting)
Sure, should be no problem building something that can filter out a mass of pollution LARGER THAN TEXAS.
How long do you think that would take exactly? How much energy would that take? How are you going to transport the debris that is collected? Where are you going to put it? Is the solution more "green" than the problem?
This is a repeat thread with the same recommended, knee jerk solutions.
Re:Here's a thought... (Score:3, Interesting)
Bind it with another agent that will make it heaver than water and kick it over board and let it sink to the bottom.
Re:Overreaction (Score:2, Interesting)
Wow I know no one bothers to rtfa, but not even bothering to read the post you are replying to?
Nice, you've taken slashdot to a new level, congratulations.
This is an engineering problem, not a religious war. It has a solution but being a naysayer isn't part of it.
How long?
It took us what 60 years to cause the problem so it so anything less than that is a win, wouldn't you think?
Ok then,
Older Big ships run on steam. Water dosen't care what makes it boil.
That takes care of part of the energy requirements (depending on how dense the usable plastic is) and takes care of 93%ish of the bulk of the waste.
The CO2 capture is not all that tricky considering that the ships will be pretty big, bubble the exhaust thru some seawater and flow it across the decks in the sun, phytoplankton turn it into more plankton which we then use to re-seed the "cleaned" areas.
More green? you are going to have to very carefully define exactly what "more green" means. .01 % of the surface of the oceans, those creatures exist to reproduce and should manage to repopulate those areas just fine.
I'm pretty sure that we can figure out how to get the plastic out of the water. Yes it will probably kill countless billions of tiny tiny little sea creatures. Fortunately we are still talking about a good deal less than
Just how important is getting the plastic out of the water or conversely, just how bad is the plastic for the local environment?
Re:Are you going to believe your eyes, or our stor (Score:2, Interesting)
dude, fuck off.
or in other words, I'll take the word of an actual scientist at one of the US's finest oceanographic research institutes, with a professional reputation to protect, over some random /.ers political hunch.
signed, your friendly neighborhood oceanographer who has seen these garbage slicks mid-ocean with his own eyes. Yes, much of the plastic is still in visible chunks. It's disgusting. The non-visible stuff is measured by concentrated by plankton accumulating nets which record the volume of water passing through them allowing density calculations.
Re:Watch conservatives spin it... (Score:2, Interesting)
I just read Beyond Developmentality, a fascinating book on this subject. Quoting from the blurb:
The author, Dr.Debal Deb, is a renowned ecologist and environmental biologist with several publications [cintdis.org] in the field.
Full disclosure: I personally know Dr.Deb, but this post is not a shameless plug to boost sales. I truly believe that what the book recommends is mankind's only real hope. See
http://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Developmentality-Constructing-Inclusive-Sustainability/dp/1844077128 [amazon.com]
Or
look it up on google [google.com]