Cleaning the Oceans of Plastic
I have begun a project intended to clear the oceans of the multiple 'Great Garbage Patches' in the East & West Pacific, North & South Atlantic, etc. I would like to get my fellow Gulcher's opinion on the merit and level of interest such a project might inspire.
The prolem of ocean plastic does seem quite remote to my life. This past weekend I made the mistake of watching a documentary which highlighted the plight of ocean animals unfortunate enough to occupy the stretches of ocean which humans have polluted.
Birds, mammals, fish, and the rest of the sea life are ingesting bits of this garbage, and it is becoming lodged in their guts. The animals are starving to death with their abdomens full of this indigestible material. It was disturbing to see.
More importantly, the plastics tend to leach numerous 'toxic' materials (I'll leave the issue of the actual toxicity out for now) which tend to concentrate in the higher animals as we move up the food chain, this is not new science, but long established fact.
Putting all emotional factors aside, I am interested in the general perception here of a project -- INDEPENDENTLY FUNDED -- (of course) which consists of building a fleet of 300 mechanical whales, whose sole purpose if to swim the oceans, eating the garbage.
Scientific reports and commercial observations put the mass of garbage in one of the Pacific gyres at 750,000 tons, spread out over an area the size of Texas 250,000 square miles.
Each of the 'whales' I propose constructing would cost in the range of $500k with a length of ~35 meters (115 ft). These behemoths would 'swim' slowly, just below the surface, constantly sucking in the top two meters of sea water, much like it's biological counterparts.
Putting the whole effort into perspective: Each mouthful of water would on average contain the food equivalent of 280kCal of 'nutrition' meaning the energy that this 'creature' needs to swim into the next mouthful of garbage.
Borrowing from nature, I have done several energy balance analyses. I concluded that the passive technique of filter feeding is the only possible way to make a self sustaining machine capable of processing even these tiny pockets of contaminated oceans.
And here is where the Objectivist in me needs opinions pro & con. These devices will not collect anything during their 15 year missions. they will swim, and they will eat. None of the plastic will be harvested for resale, reuse, recycling, etc, it will be pyrolyzed, and burned as fuel to power the machine.
So unless the benefits of a cleaner ocean can be monetized, this project lacks one of the key factors of an economically viable enterprise.
Of course there is money to be made by the shipworks that builds the fleet. So it's not a total giveaway.
I eagerly await comments from my fellow Gulchers. Either way. Regardless of the consensus of division reached here I will be starting a crowd-funding campaign to build a prototype in the coming days & weeks.
Thank you all.
The prolem of ocean plastic does seem quite remote to my life. This past weekend I made the mistake of watching a documentary which highlighted the plight of ocean animals unfortunate enough to occupy the stretches of ocean which humans have polluted.
Birds, mammals, fish, and the rest of the sea life are ingesting bits of this garbage, and it is becoming lodged in their guts. The animals are starving to death with their abdomens full of this indigestible material. It was disturbing to see.
More importantly, the plastics tend to leach numerous 'toxic' materials (I'll leave the issue of the actual toxicity out for now) which tend to concentrate in the higher animals as we move up the food chain, this is not new science, but long established fact.
Putting all emotional factors aside, I am interested in the general perception here of a project -- INDEPENDENTLY FUNDED -- (of course) which consists of building a fleet of 300 mechanical whales, whose sole purpose if to swim the oceans, eating the garbage.
Scientific reports and commercial observations put the mass of garbage in one of the Pacific gyres at 750,000 tons, spread out over an area the size of Texas 250,000 square miles.
Each of the 'whales' I propose constructing would cost in the range of $500k with a length of ~35 meters (115 ft). These behemoths would 'swim' slowly, just below the surface, constantly sucking in the top two meters of sea water, much like it's biological counterparts.
Putting the whole effort into perspective: Each mouthful of water would on average contain the food equivalent of 280kCal of 'nutrition' meaning the energy that this 'creature' needs to swim into the next mouthful of garbage.
Borrowing from nature, I have done several energy balance analyses. I concluded that the passive technique of filter feeding is the only possible way to make a self sustaining machine capable of processing even these tiny pockets of contaminated oceans.
And here is where the Objectivist in me needs opinions pro & con. These devices will not collect anything during their 15 year missions. they will swim, and they will eat. None of the plastic will be harvested for resale, reuse, recycling, etc, it will be pyrolyzed, and burned as fuel to power the machine.
So unless the benefits of a cleaner ocean can be monetized, this project lacks one of the key factors of an economically viable enterprise.
Of course there is money to be made by the shipworks that builds the fleet. So it's not a total giveaway.
I eagerly await comments from my fellow Gulchers. Either way. Regardless of the consensus of division reached here I will be starting a crowd-funding campaign to build a prototype in the coming days & weeks.
Thank you all.
Jan
As to marine life -- I'm more worried about barnacles than sharks.
One of the other aspects of this problem - one easier to control is that the source of much of the plastic is from urban storm drains. If there were coarse screens on the storm drains, much of the source of the problem might be removed.
Jan
The film I saw toured a 'land-fill' in the Philippines. The mountain of garbage was 160 feet high and covered dozens of square miles. The filth was palpable and I swore I could smell the burning stench. Many areas of the mountain were emitting great lingering clouds of smoke & steam as fires tunneled their way into the piles. The proximity of the landfill to the sea was intentional. the planners actually expected the degraded garbage to flow out with the tides.
I have been thinking about making large batteries in the ocean right off the beach at Hospice in Branford.
I think the single biggest complaint the 'rabid environmentalists' will have is that in 15 years they'll lose one of their cause célèbre. We'll see.
I agree, the really disgusting part of the problem comes from asia, the philippines, indonesia, etc. Where garbage in the slums just flows into the ocean.
But the rest of the problem is stuff falling off ships. I cite 'rubber duckies' jokingly and seriously. But fishing nets, buoys, and the flotsam & jetsam of civilization is all out there!
I would hope that Greenpeace and all the rest of the eco-warriors would choose to endorse this project. While I have great confidence in my engineering skills and my ability to make my whales physically manifest on reality, I'm also not kidding myself to suggest that there is money to be made in their operation.
They do not harvest any natural (I don't consider floating garbage to be natural) resources. They will collect data, but I do not know if the data each whale would collect over its 15 year lifespan is worth the cost of construction. They are also very slow and ponderous. There's not enough energy in the 'food' they swallow for them to 'swim' under power. They have fins to control their direction and orientation, and bladders to manage buoyancy. The move in the direction the mouth ingests and the tail exhausts. (I just didn't want to call them jellyfish.)
It all comes down to numbers. There is actually more Platinum in a shovelfull of road gravel then there is energy in all that water. The buoyancy of water works on my favor here... {ha-ha}
But hey. I'm an optimist too. Maybe the beast swims into a particularly dirty patch of water and even after summoning its mates, all the tanks are full of oil.
The single logistics challenge then becomes: Can a barge be deployed 3,000 miles out to sea to pickup say a quarter million gallons of oil? Or if the value of that endeavor too small to justify the voyage? I dunno.
Chances are that the economics won't support the expedition/pickup. In that case the whales can actually switch into higher gear. Clean faster, and be done with the job sooner.
And this is why I love spreadsheets. ;^)
While the amount of plastic waste out there is enormous, it's scattered so far and wide that recovery would be a fool's errand. I spent a day building a spreadsheet to compute the energy contained in all the waste in all the water. The ratio was very small.
So I worked out how much energy there was in the biggest 'swallow' of water I could reasonably capture in an oceangoing sluice-box.
Then I started computing the energy necessary to push that water through the screens in a reasonable amount of time ~ 5 minutes, wasting as little power as possible.
I computed how much water the debris would entrain in its wet goopiness, and how much water I could evaporate with the remaining available energy after the filtering cost.
More of the energy in the fuel is consumed by pyrolyzing the long polymers into gases & liquids. and then only a fraction of that fuel energy is converted into electricity by the Diesel genset.
At the bottom of the spreadsheet I had a TINY positive remainder of energy! Not much, but in nature, huge energy surpluses are rare. Bringing it home would take more energy in new fuel oil than the yield in recycled oil recovered. It's a poor strategy.
There is just enough 'food' out there in the garbage patch gyres to support my population of whales for 15 years. After that, like 99.9% of all species that ever evolved, they will starve, die and go 'extinct' {sniff}.
Looks to me the only way you could profit would be selling the beast to other countries for the same use in their areas.
But, what has me scratching my head is why haven't we recycled the plastic back into the oil is was made from...from the beginning?
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