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.
2) They provide value to you monetarily.
Before it became apparent in 2008/2009 that President Zero was going to finance my solar energy competition with the proceeds of the small, non-cronyist biofuels company that I was director of engineering for, my business partners and I profited by assuaging the guilt of liberals. We even had a guy working with us who, while in Poland in 1958 at age 20, invented a plasma arc reactor similar to Mr. Fusion from The Back to the Future movies. He was as close to a living John Galt as I am ever likely to meet. The ten people in our biofuels company each read AS in 2008, sold the company in early 2009, and shrugged. We had no problem exchanging our value for their value, but were not going to do it with a withering customer base. Likewise, your mechanical whales project, if funded privately and not altruistically, can be morally acceptable if sufficiently profitable.
The plasma arc reactor my former colleague invented is a little more energy efficient than the internal combustion engine and is more fuel-flexible. Given the variety of hydrocarbon sources your mechanical whales would consume, the plasma arc reactor might be a good choice for your project. What made our plasma arc reactor system better than its plasma arc competitors was the relatively low power it used; this meant that metals were not aerosolized. In your case, any metals ought to remain nonvolatile after pyrolysis, but would have to be removed from the whales during maintenance cycles.
One of the bigger issues to overcome will be obtaining permissions to approach other countries' borders as a "toxic" garbage seagoing vessel.
I don't expect that there will be a lot of free metal in the pollution, as most of it will have likely sunk to the bottom. The whales will be equipped with a formidable set of 'teeth' in the form of a shredder which will be able to chew up fishing nets, wooden pallets, and rubber duckies.
I was actually planning to use a fluidized bed reactor to generate a mixed stream of gasified and liquefiable hydrocarbons. This will run a small 20kW genset. Most of the electric power runs the filters, which also provides the swimming motive force. All of the waste heat goes to drying what was ingested. Up to 10% of the garbage's energy is budgeted to be stored as 'light fat' (oils), to keep the beast swimming through the patches of clean water, like when a storm blows things around.
P.S. Because of the high energy concentration of the occasional floating solids (treats), the extra energy in these snacks will mostly be stored as partially processed 'chewed cud' within the envelope of the beast. It will also alert its fellows that there is a rich grazing area to be exploited.
While my friend whom I compare to John Galt was the inventor of the plasma arc reactor, I was responsible for feed prepurification and all unit operations downstream of the reactor. Indeed removing salt is the first prepurification step.
The key to the energy efficiency of our plasma arc was a modification that I will not post on the Internet such that the energy required to sustain the plasma after the reaction was started could be lowered considerably.
The amount of silica is likely to be problematic. This can be solved, but not very cheaply. Electrostatic precipitators are better than standard gas filters in this respect.
To get most people to buy into this, you may have to make your whale a "bottom feeder". That is where most of the hazardous waste is.
Purification and preparation of the waste prior to processing is an unavailable luxury. That's why I rejected plasma in favor of a fluidised bed.
YES! I'd live to borrow some of your expertise & experience. Is that un Galt-like?
While I've worked a project that was deployed in geologically active areas (geothermal plant) it was subject to the constant corrosive effects of sulphur bearing gases, but only the occasional (weekly) earthquake. I suspect the sea, with it's constant motion and only mildly corrosive saltwater requires different design choices.
worms eating plastic is a joke. Italy finding this is a joke.
when you look at the rivers that flow through the Asian countries the cleanest water is at the start of the river and as it goes down stream there is significant human waste deposited along the way. you shouldn't eat seafood that is harvested in the mecong delta.
All of this crap about polluted oceans is directed at the USA and we in the USA are more conscious of eliminating pollution that ANY OTHER COUNTRY IN THE WORLD.. It is time to let the USA rest.
But these gyres are well documented. They exist, they are real, they are killing wildlife, and the garbage is working its way up the foodchain.
If you had asked me this question last week, I'd've been in near agreement with what you stated. Interestingly I still agree with most of your statements. Just not the conclusions.
My project won't do anything to STOP the new pollution, except perhaps create awareness. But it will reduce the problem which CURRENTLY exists.
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?
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}.
I have been thinking about making large batteries in the ocean right off the beach at Hospice in Branford.
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. ;^)
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 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.)
Your idea is fabulous.....however I guarantee the biggest polluting countries will not pay for this, and sure as hell the average ocean hugger wont spend one dime of their own money, they will spend their time trying to squeeze money out of the producers because they have omitted the sin of creating wealth.
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 considered this defense mechanism early on, for the simple reason that I don't want salvage vessels to haul the whales aboard and carve then up as a few hundred tons of scrap stainless steel! They're unmanned after all.
But the primary reason is to escape the worst of the ocean weather. 30ft seas can ruin a 100ft vessel in a very short time. If it dips 140ft below the surface and hangs there, those 30 ft waves are just ripples on the pond.
Once the danger has past, the ballast tanks are blown, the whale rises back to the surface and it resumes feeding.
I'm not certain what the specifics in maritime law are regarding blue-water UAV's flying flags, flashing strobes, ringing bells, etc. is, but I don't believe compliance is a huge obstacle. I do know that each whale will be in communication with its fellow behemoths.
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
As to marine life -- I'm more worried about barnacles than sharks.
Jan