Faux Flux

This ocean cleanup reminds me of the solar roadways idea and the wind energy ideas which always pop up, and those oddball ideas with enough marketing that always seem to dupe the soft science/tech media every few months. Some of these are naive. Some miss fatal flaws in feasibility, either technically or financially. Many of these ideas seem to just be in the right place at the right time to get media attention, or these days, go viral. And occasionally there’s one that really is a good idea.

But others are marketing built on what can at best be described as willful ignorance and at worst, dishonesty. And those ones always seem to get the most attention. As I mentioned, wind energy is a great example: Dodgy wind? Why “innovative” turbines are often anything but

The article I found which critiques the ocean cleanup idea is here: The Fallacy of Cleaning the Gyres of Plastic With a Floating “Ocean Cleanup Array”

If you don’t want to read it, the TLDR is that this falls into the naive category. These people have no clue how BIG the ocean is, how corrosive, and how physically punishing it is – something like the structure proposed by Boyan Slat wouldn’t survive a year – it might not last a month – and that’s assuming it’d be economical if it did survive, which it won’t. There’s no market for the waste plastic, it’d devastate the plankton and other sea life, and actually plastic will tend to wash up on beaches eventually anyway.

So it turns out Mr Slat has responded, rather comprehensively: Responding to critics

Scanning through it:

Point 2 – he says his idea is new because there’s no patent. Yes there’s no patent but that only means if anyone had the idea, they didn’t try patenting it. I have personally had this idea myself and so has everybody else who’s thought about the problem for 5 minutes. It’s not a new concept at all; similar devices have been used to contain oil spills for years, and everybody with any experience in ocean cleanup operations knows about them and would use them for cleaning up bigger messes if they could.

Point 3 – he says they have designed a 100 KILOMETER long barrier that will withstand the open ocean. If he was Elon Musk I’d still want evidence that such a structure could be feasible. How do you keep 100km of floating barriers under control in ocean conditions without the links being ripped apart? Perhaps there’s something I’m missing. But it is very easy to assume they simply don’t comprehend the environment or physics involved.

Point 7 – they talk about how they can turn the plastic gathered into products, even if of lower quality. If this were true, where is all the plastic we put in recycling bins going? It’s already gathered in convenient boxes, and we could melt-form that together, to “make new materials” as Mr Slat says. We don’t do that because it’s still not worth it.

Manufacturers don’t want unsorted plastic debris because they can’t work with it economically. They can’t make usable, predictable products without the right feedstock. They want nice, uniform, homogeneous, clean material, if they can get it. So if random debris from recycle bins isn’t in demand, once we factor in the cost of gathering hugely dispersed material which will make this debris even more expensive as a feedstock than the recycle bin debris that ALREADY we have trouble finding markets for… it looks bleak.

I’m scanning through more of Mr Slat’s document, and to be fair much of what i’m scanning looks reasonable, if it is assumed the claims stack up (i.e. they really did a study on this or that, they did a proper simulation and had it validated etc – but so many times when I’ve heard such things, i’m disappointed when i dig)

My take on it is this. If a device such as this really could be built, I’d hope they simply incinerate the plastic collected for its calorific value. It’s analogous to the problem of the plastic supermarket bag. Yes you could recycle it, but once you take into account the energy required to gather all the bags and transport them to a recycling centre, you’re going to be burning more fossil fuels per bag than if you were to just burn the bag. FAR more. Try weighing one of those bags; they weigh nothing. A drop of oil. Burn more than that drop in processing, and you might as well have just burned the bag.

Which is why I’d hope Mr Slat’s idea, if it were made real (and it’d be damned impressive, building a 100km-long barrier in the ocean), simply burned the plastic. You could expend energy, send good money after bad, recycling them into poor-quality products that get thrown away anyway. Or perhaps you could extract the energy.

There’s one more problem brought up by the critics, which I agree with: if we could recycle this plastic, more plastic would keep getting into the ocean. And there’s more virgin material being produced all the time. All that, along with anything we recycle, will just keep getting into the oceans. We need a solution at the source, not the sink. This technological fix reminds me of ideas from decades ago, in which the real problem of production is ignored while we attempt to dream up clever disposal methods. It’s great people are thinking about these things, but attempting to clean the ocean is an ambulance at the bottom of the cliff. We tend to find putting a fence at the top negates the need for the ambulance.

Good on Boyan Slat for trying. Perhaps some aspect of what they develop can be used in other technologies and techniques to reduce, reuse and recycle. But the idea, as it is, looks technologically infeasible (the length of the barrier and the open ocean conditions you’d expect, not to mention many other things I’ve not discussed), financially infeasible (the proposed use of the debris collected) and missing a couple elephants in the room (the pointlessness of attempting to make products from such feedstock and the focus on the sink rather than the source)