Rubbish dump found floating in Pacific Ocean is twice the size of America

[pete_1967]

A rubbish dump twice the size of the United States has been discovered floating in the Pacific Ocean.

The vast expanse of debris, made up of plastic junk including footballs, kayaks, Lego blocks and carrier bags, is kept together by swirling underwater currents.

It stretches from 500 nautical miles off the Californian coast, across the northern Pacific, past Hawaii and almost as far as Japan.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/liv...n_page_id=1811
http://www.independent.co.uk/environ...an-778016.html

Great...

[cable_txg]

Just great!!! what a bunch of messed up species we are! And who the heck is going to clean up that mess? More political talks and more money in some airheads wallet that does not give a crap!.... Space anyone?

[Perpetual]

Rather depressing.

[Dan]

After ten years of collecting household garbage in a "dump" out at the old homestead, the contents of that dump would not fill the bed of a compact pickup. However, that was out in a rural area, and we used a specifically designed burn barrel to dispose of the bulk of the garbage.

There's a reason most of our ancestors burned their trash.


Dan

[cable_txg]

Originally Posted by Dan

After ten years of collecting household garbage in a "dump" out at the old homestead, the contents of that dump would not fill the bed of a compact pickup. However, that was out in a rural area, and we used a specifically designed burn barrel to dispose of the bulk of the garbage.

There's a reason most of our ancestors burned their trash.


Dan

Yep, that was until we decided to add more harmful chemicals to plastics and other items! Aren't we the smart ones!!!!

[Evil_Bert]

Is it too late to emigrate to, say, Mars?

How the heck do we (the human race) solve this problem? If we don't, it's just going to get worse.

[thinking out aloud] .... Maybe all manufacturers should be forced to develop a full lifecycle, including demonstration of recycling, re-use or disposal, of each entire product (i.e. every component), and until that happens, the product cannot be sold (or even imported in the case of foreign manufacture).

[cable_txg]

I agree to that motion Evil_Bert!

[pete_1967]

Originally Posted by Evil_Bert

Is it too late to emigrate to, say, Mars?

How the heck do we (the human race) solve this problem? If we don't, it's just going to get worse.

[thinking out aloud] .... Maybe all manufacturers should be forced to develop a full lifecycle, including demonstration of recycling, re-use or disposal, of each entire product (i.e. every component), and until that happens, the product cannot be sold (or even imported in the case of foreign manufacture).

Not much they can do against people dumping their trash overboard boat/ ship or leaving it anywhere except wastebin really.

[Evil_Bert]

Originally Posted by pete_1967

Not much they can do against people dumping their trash overboard boat/ ship or leaving it anywhere except wastebin really.

Shoot them and dump them overboard? They're biodegradable, unlike the trash.

[stevea]

Originally Posted by pete_1967

Not much they can do against people dumping their trash overboard boat/ ship or leaving it anywhere except wastebin really.

Specifically no, but if you force companies to remove exactly as much polyethelene (for example) from use as they produce, and they will find the cheapest way to harvest their offset, and yes all polyethelene users pay extra for this mandate. Once the flotsam has monetary value it will cease to be thrown overboard and may even be collected.

Anyway you are missing the big opportunity here, we force Lego to only make white legos and the reflectivity of 100M tons of these will increase the earth albedo and solve global warming.

On a darker note the fundamental and unavoidable problem is that the less hirsute primates have overproduced, tsk tsk. There are too many of them for the amount of resources. We could find more resources (and use these somewhat less efficiently to avoid polluting the other resources) or we could ask ... say 1/3rd of the planetary population to "step off".

Any volunteers ? I thought not. Everyone complains about the weather and overpopulation but nobody ...

[Evil_Bert]

Originally Posted by stevea

... say 1/3rd of the planetary population to "step off".

Any volunteers ?

It's more like 2/3rds, unfortunately, according to environmental groups.

I think the Japanese are on the right track with development of domestic/service robots. That might seem a bit unrelated at first, but the robots are necessary for workforce capacity and to care for us in old age.

Combine the robots with a forced one-child-per-couple policy (worldwide), more efficient use of resources and whatever the next deadly pandemic will be, and we might have a fighting chance. If not, then we'll just have the fighting, but not the chance.

But, on the bright side .......... uh .......... mmm ............ ah ............yeah.

[bob]

Not to belittle the thread, but the original quote was 'twice the size of Texas', I believe. Strange that something of this magnitude is only being discovered now. We've got satellites mapping the world - why did it take one guy in a boat to find it? I think there's a lot more to this story than we now know.

All that said, I take the trash to the dump twice a week and am amazed by the amount that two elderly people are constantly creating. Plastic packaging is almost universal now. Hopefully, something can be done to recycle it or make it somehow biodegradable without creating a toxic sludge in the process.

[lazlow]

One would think that this would be an easy place to recycle. Cast out nets, pull it in, run it through a shredder, pack it in the hold. Dump it off on shore at a recycling plant. The sea has separated off most of the "excess" garbage from the plastic.

[Evil_Bert]

Originally Posted by lazlow

One would think that this would be an easy place to recycle. Cast out nets, pull it in, run it through a shredder, pack it in the hold. Dump it off on shore at a recycling plant. The sea has separated off most of the "excess" garbage from the plastic.

I hadn't intended to be so active in this thread, but .....

The garbage is floating under the surface, down to 10 metres depth. That's also where most of the life in the oceans is, making filtering garbage from lifeforms a bit tricky. Nevertherless, assuming some high-tech garbage-processing/trawler-type vessel can be built to do it, then consider the shear size of the problem.

Let's say the vessel has a 10 metre beam, with 20 metre booms either side, so that's about 50 metres filter-width. Also assume that all 10-metres of depth is covered in a single pass (although given the task complexity probably a bit optimistic). At 6 knots (not unreasonable for trawling speed) the vessel will cover 0.56km^2/hour. Assuming such a vessel is at sea 50% of the year, with 50% on task (the remainder in transit, these numbers are reasonable, btw), it will cover 1215km^2/year. The garbage patch covers about 20 million square km. So, if we want this cleaned up at a rate clearly above the rate of garbage accumulation, let's aim for 10 years to complete one pass. That would then take 1,645 vessels operating simultaneously.

Now what's the chance a vessel could be built to cover a 50-metre wide, 10-metre deep swathe, in one pass, with 100% effectiveness without destroying a lot of marine life? Not much. And the cost of such a high-tech vessel? Equating it to a marine science/research vessel costing $50 million, then that would be a capital outlay of $82 billion, plus ongoing costs of around $50K/day/vessel (about $18 million per vessel per year). So that's about $380 billion over 10 years.

I'll make a rough stab that, even if it were technically feasible in the first place, a high-tech vessel trawling for garbage is maybe 10% effective ... and needs 10 passes to get the job 'done' (conveniently ignoring diminishing returns). And then there's times when the weather is too rough to operate, slowing the whole process. Probably not unreasonable, then, to multiply costs by 10.

Got a spare $3.8 trillion?

[lazlow]

EB

Look at the flip side of the equation. How many spare oceans do we have? As you said the majority of ocean life is living in that same space. Can we live without that life? I am sure as this thing grows it will begin to block a significant portion of some needed frequencies of light. While whatever needs that light might not be directly important to us, it probably is indirectly (think food chain).

Why not just use the big commercial fishing vessels? Excluding hole size, a net is a net and a catch is a catch, except you do not have to keep this one on ice. Many of the fishing fleets have floating canneries. The smaller vessels go out and net the fish, and transfer the fish to the cannery ship. When the fish leaves the cannery ship it is ready for retail sale (canned, boxed frozen, whatever). It would not be that difficult to build a "shredder ship". In the mid nineties the US government canceled the contract for two new carriers. Both hulls were already built(floating). One of them wound up being a floating casino out beyond the 12 (?) mile limit (US jurisdiction). Just to give you an idea how big carries are, the older and smaller carriers( like the Enterprise) have a standing crew of about 5,000.