Posts Tagged ‘environment’
Imagine a giant island, twice the size of Texas, sitting practically in the middle of the Pacific Ocean but unable to be seen with the naked eye or by satellites. While it sounds like a futuristic C-list sci-fi movie, it’s actually completely true. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, comprised of trash such as plastic, metal, and cloth materials, was first theorized and studied in the 1980s (PDF) and has been since verified as reality in the North Pacific Gyre. Because trash in the ocean begins to degrade within one year, expelling dangerous chemicals such as bisphenol A, it’s especially important to begin cleaning up the hazardous waste as soon as possible.
A recent, well-publicized expedition called the Scripps Environmental Accumulation of Plastic Expedition (SEAPLEX) sought to study the breadth of the trash vortex and also consider the feasibility of a commercial clean-up. Supported by Project Kaisei, they found that despite most of the plastic parts being in bite-size bits, they also found more trash than they expected: perhaps more than 100 million tons of debris. That calls for not just a large-scale clean-up, but could also mean big money for the commercial salvage and recycle companies.
The first problem in picking up this trash is procedure. The Scripps team designed a net specifically meant to trawl the subsurface of the ocean for approximately 40,000 tons of trash without killing the marine life which has made the trash its home. While this plan has seemingly worked well for gauging the amount of trash, I don’t think it’s a particularly feasible approach for short- and long-term salvage. Instead, I would suggest an innovative retrofitting of ships mimicking a combine harvester.
The boat’s design would begin with the most important part: the front. With an almost open-ended design, much like that of the back-end of a whaling boat, the salvage boat would extend a hydraulic shovel-like extension underneath the surface of the water to collect the subsurface debris. Much like the combine harvester, this extension would lead to a rotating cylinder which moves the trash upwards and into the hull, where collection would take place. The water, meanwhile, would filter through the back of the extension, leaving much of the wildlife untouched.
Collection, as previously described, would take place in the hull of the boat. The trash would enter via the cylinder and travel through several conveyors and would shoot out the side of the boat through an unloader (much as a combine harvester unloads corn or wheat into a dump truck) into smaller boats, which would take the trash back to a central processing ship or offshore platform (much like floating oil platforms). The trash, after processing, would then be packaged and shipped back to shore for recycling.
Using this approach I believe a commercial enterprise would easily monopolize the salvaging of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, helping not only to clean up the environment but also make a rather large amount of money. With a current patch of over 100 million tons of trash and over 1,000 tons of trash being dumped into the ocean yearly, this type of enterprise has both short- and long-term value both environmentally and economically.