h a l f b a k e r yA hive of inactivity
add, search, annotate, link, view, overview, recent, by name, best, random
news, help, about, links, report a problem
browse anonymously,
or get an account
and write.
register,
|
|
|
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is estimated at 10 million square kilometres, where discarded plastic trash is caught in the North Pacific Gyre (a sort of slow whirlpool in the middle of the Pacific Ocean).
In places, the concentration of plastic is in excess of 40,000 pieces of plastic per square
kilometre... forming an area of ecological disaster that is killing massive numbers of seabirds and other marine creatures. Midway Island has beaches that are basically 3-6 feet of garbage.
What I'm proposing is a fleet of trawlers that deliberately net this crap and incinerate it at very high temperatures, using the energy generated to power the incinerator and the ship. In the process there will be a substantial bycatch of fish that can be used for foodstuffs if sufficiently uncontaminated by PCBs, etc.
Funding the project is a simple matter of a 0.1c levy per plastic bag, plastic bottle and plastic butane lighter sold. There are about 750 billion plastic bags made each year; Roughly the same number of plastic bottles and about 10 billion plastic lighters are also produced every year. That's 1,500,000,000,000 items, which would yield $1.5B for the project, at the rate of duty I have proposed.
Hell, it could even give the Japanese whaling fleet some good publicity and a useful task.
The GPGP, in a little detail
http://www.theecolo...asp?content_id=1169
[UnaBubba, Oct 09 2008]
Some serious info about plastic contamination in the North Pacific.
http://www.mindfull...ic-Central-Gyre.htm
[UnaBubba, Oct 09 2008]
Ocean Cleaning Robots
Ocean_20Cleaning_20Robots
[django, Oct 11 2008]
Make an island
Garbageland
[Voice, Oct 13 2008]
Please log in.
If you're not logged in,
you can see what this page
looks like, but you will
not be able to add anything.
Annotation:
|
| |
It's only going to re-accumulate though. *sigh* |
|
| |
Salt water plastics won't be good for the boilers too, but yeah, the levy would pay for maintenance. |
|
| |
I thought about this again, while I was in the shower. A solar-powered plasma furnace would overcome the water and salt issues. |
|
| |
/A solar-powered plasma furnace/ |
|
| |
Sounds far-fetched. Elaborate, if you please. |
|
| |
Point enough mirrors, reflecting sunlight, at one point and you get temperatures between 4,000 and 11,000deg C. That's roughly the surface temperature of the sun... plasma furnace that I propose to use to vaporise and ionise plastics, rendering PCBs and dioxins into individual atoms and therefore safe. |
|
| |
Plasma is really just ionised gas, and can therefore exist at temperatures from near absolute zero, to room temperature (in a plasma TV) up to about 1 x 10^18deg K, in a magnetic fusion environment. |
|
| |
//Point enough mirrors//
Old AOL CD-ROMs? |
|
| |
That's probably the best use for them. |
|
| |
if only there was a clean way to burn it with no nasty byproducts but then we wouldn't be throwing it away would we? If you could cleanly, cheaply, and effectively, incinerate plastic waste we wouldn't be having this problem. |
|
| |
whatcha wanna do is separate out the hydrogen, use that for fuel, and dump the rest back in the ocean (carbon, bit of sulphur, some chlorine, mostly). |
|
| |
Thoroughly baked, by me [link]. |
|
| |
You're right, [django]. I missed your post. I even found the discussion had covered the idea of plasma gasification of the waste. |
|
| |
I'll take this down tomorrow if you wish. |
|
| |
Please feel free to take any part of the idea or discussion here and incorporate it into your idea. It's an issue that is too important to ignore. |
|
| |
//if only there was a clean way to burn it with no nasty byproducts //
There is, look into plasma gasification, [WcW]. |
|
| |
No [UnaBubba], let it be, there's some differences between your and my idea, for sure. That's why it's "half"-baked anyways. |
|
| |
Not getting my croissant, though :-) |
|
| |
You got mine. I'll set Dubbel Zout Man loose on you! |
|
| |
You're right about the differences. Mine uses existing technology and otherwise ecologically destructive fishing and whaling fleets to implement a fully funded collection scheme to clean up the plastic. |
|
| |
Most of the plastic in the ocean probably comes from the dubious practice of dumping at sea, or failing to prevent pollution in rivers being freely discharged to sea. |
|
| |
Why don't we organise a competition, [UnaBubba]. An X-Prize for the technology that succeeds in cleaning up most. The battble between the ferocious Plastic-Powered Pooper Scooper Fleet and the sneaky Ocean Cleaning Robots. Eh. |
|
| |
I have other things to actually do. Some of them earn me money. |
|
| |
I get the impression it would be quite difficult. When is the last time you saw a picture of this Texas-sized garbage patch? |
|
| |
It's not a thick layer of crust on the top of the water. |
|
| |
Fishing trawlers don't exactly head for a patch of ocean that is thick enough with fish to walk upon, either. They've found fine particles of plastic as deep as 2700m (10,000ft) in places. |
|
| |
Fishing trawlers don't have to sieve for fine particles of plastic either. |
|
| |
They can if you want them to. It's merely a question of mesh size. |
|
| |
Rather than incineration, I suggest re-forming the plastic into expanded foam. Extrude this into sheets and tow it to the Arctic as subsitute ice sheet. The polar bears will have somewhere to rest, and the albedo of the surface will be similar to ice. |
|
| |
The smaller the mesh size, the more energy required to sieve. |
|
| |
The smaller the mesh size, the more plastic you catch, the more energy you can generate. |
|
| |
I think evolution will handle it the same way it has handled oxygen, rocks, CO2, and other things in the environment. Soon we will see jellyfish posing as plastic bags, baby fish shaped like cigarette butts, fish that can dissolve and use the high energy content of plastic trash, plastic-bottle carnivours, and so forth. And whats more, they will evolve to avoid human contact! In the oceans there will be huge groups of animals that live solely for our garbage. |
|
| |
Are you aware of how many generations it takes for that sort of morphology to occur? |
|
| |