The Great Pacific Garbage Patch could be gone in ten years – for chump change After six years of sea trials, environmental group The Ocean Cleanup claims it has proved that the Great Pacific Garbage Patch – a floating mass of plastic waste twice the size of Texas – could be cleaned up in ten years using current technology, at a cost of a mere $7.5 billion. Speaking in San Francisco last Friday, Ocean …
It's a super initiative, I truly hope that it achievable.
However, how does one educate people to a level where they will no longer use the ocean as a garbage disposal unit ?
It should be a achievable in the 1st world countries , the 2nd and 3rd world present a whole other set of problems.
We were recently in Thailand and as much as it is a beautiful country it appears as though zero effort is made to ask people to not throw plastic and rubbish into the roadside. I would presume that most of the neighbourimg countries are the same. We saw the same thing in Egypt and Morocco.
Is it just a case of financial dynamics or are the rich countries just better at shipping of their shit to other countries.
I look at the rubbish strewn across the roadsides here in semi-rural Buckinghamshire and your definition leads me to consider that the UK is perhaps not a 1st world country :/
I contrast that to our travels in southern Germany, Austria and Switzerland this summer where the roadsides were absolutely spotless by comparison. We spent the best part of a week at an Austrian lake and I didn't see a single item of rubbish in the water, at all, and I really was trying to spot anything by the end.
> Part of that is the people in those countries take some pride in their surroundings
I think it's more that there's a greater emphasis on recycling in those countries.
To take my personal anecdotal examples: I've been to a few German music festivals, and they're a complete revelation as compared to British ones: clean and tidy. But there's a very strong emphasis on deposits (aka pfand): when shopping, pretty much any item in a recyclable container carries a 25c deposit, which can be redeemed by feeding said container into a machine which will scan the barcode(s) and spit out a receipt which can be used at a shop. Similarly, all drinks containers at the festivals tend to carry a 2-5 euro deposit.
Result: everywhere is clean and tidy. And especially during festival season, poorer locals can earn a bit of extra cash by either scouring bins for pfand-carrying containers, or by simply loitering near to where queues of people build up; I've seen people taking away bags containing hundreds if not thousands of items!
Conversely, I went to a music festival in Austria. Which doesn't have the pfand scheme[*], though they do have deposits on drink containers. As a result, while it was still measurably nicer than a British festival (e.g. Download), there was considerably more littering and general mess as compared to the German festivals!
Get people into the right mindset - i.e. recyclable items have value, and shouldn't just be thrown away - and things improve.
[*] Yet. Looks like they're introducing it next year!
https://www.recycling-magazine.com/2024/01/23/austria-is-preparing-for-deposit-return-system/
The UK has become so accustomed to being a throwaway society and with comments such as 'it keeps someone in a job picking it up' it will take a long time to change attitudes. There are people who literally abandon their camping gear when a festival is over. They are not going to be bothered by a 25p deposit return.
I fully agree with a return deposit on bottles, cans and other such items.
Both Germany and Denmark have brilliant infrastructure for mandatory deposits on glass & plastic drinks bottles & tins. Larger supermarkets are also obliged to provide non-store-specific automatic recycling machines that crush the plastic & tins and bigger ones can even take crates of glass bottles. They spit out a coupon that can be redeemed for cash or used towards one's next shop.
One niggle I have though is that the German ones don't accept Danish recycling and vice versa. We try to get rid before we cross the border but there's often an expletive when we open the tailgate on the car and spot ones that have snuck across with us. It would be nice if there were an EU-wide scheme that worked cross-border.
A similar scheme seems like a no-brainer in the UK for any government that actually believes the green rhetoric it spouts.
As pointed out, it's not going to eliminate the trash Brits toss into their environment but it might go some way and maybe start instilling a better mindset.
More coppers on the beat issuing spot fines for littering (and maybe summary execution for spitting out gum!) might help too, but that's a different rant. ;-)
Given the content to container ratio I sometimes wonder what happens to all those miniature jam-jars used by hotels et. - including National Trust tearooms. It seems a waste to recycle rather then reuse them although I suspect the cost of collecting them would exceed that of buying fresh ones. Nevertheless you'd expect the NT to take an interest in them.
Yes, it seems many forget that the mantra is "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle". Recycling is the last option, but is almost always spouted as the first option, at least in practice and when any level of politician or company PR flack wants to look good in front of the cameras.
I'd also suggest that the mantra really ought to be "Reduce, Reuse, Repair, Recycle"
"Agree absolutely. There's scope for another: Repurpose. It comes between Repair and Recycle. An example would be an old wardrobe fitted out with a few bits of wood to become a bookcase."
Good one! I was considering mentioning "upcycling" but couldn't find a way to fit it in as an "R" word and anyway, upcycling seems to cover a multitude of "sins" from what you suggest right through to completely dismantling the wardrobe and building $something out of the bits, ie just using it as a source of wood :-)
I think the taking to bits and building something new with the wood counts as recycling. "Upcycling" seems to consist of taking something which might be useful or attractive as it stands and uglifying it with an inappropriate paint job and/or converting it into a light fitting.
In the 1940s, I used to collect the discarded beer & pop bottles and redeemed the deposit. This was 1-2d. I could get a 1d of chips and scraps (enough to fill me up) when coming back from cubs.
Virtually everything was recycled, and 'unwanted' items were collected by the Rag and Bone men. If worth anything, you got paid.
I don't remember much rubbish about in the streets.
What I don’t understand, and which in German fan-zones seems to be getting more common, is lobbing your beer somewhere as soon as your team scores.
Even from a purely selfish point of view it makes no sense to me:
- the beer is very expensive
- the Pfand is very expensive
- there are often big queues to buy a new beer and you have to miss some of the match
So why oh why?!
Way back in the prehistoric era when I was a nipper pop bottles had a deposit. Us kids would collect them and take to the sweetie shop to get the money equivalent in sweets. It was simple and convenient.
From the paucity of information around it looks like the deposit return scheme will be a bit more complicated - need to take to somewhere and get a token. What happens when the returns bank is full and awaiting someone to empty it. Do we have to take the stuff home? Here in the wilds of the Highlands they seem to have forgotten to empty our bottle bank. There's a nice pile of carrier bags round it now. Don't think that will do much for a deposit return scheme (at least it proves we're trying to recycle our bottles).
I eat the 2 finger Kitkat dark - the wrappers say they should be recycled at a supermarket where you would put the unwanted carrier bags - what's the probability of my saving all the wrappers from the Kitkats and other products so I can take back to a supermarket?
Anyone read the article on the Welsh recycling - 5 to 7 bins to separate stuff into - hmmm
The Welsh system seems to work quite well from my limited experience of staying there. We had 4 bins, general crap, paper & card, plastic containers & bottles and finally glass and tins. Didn't take any time at all to sort. One thing I've never liked about mixed recycling is that it is so easy to contaminate paper and card. I've always seen the need to wash out tins as a waste of energy as they are going to get melted down so the last couple of baked beans at the bottom won't hurt anything.
> I've always seen the need to wash out tins as a waste of energy as they are going to get melted down so the last couple of baked beans at the bottom won't hurt anything.
I dunno Welch beans, but here in Maine USA if we don't wash the cans AND bottles they attract mosquitos, blackflies, skunks, and bear. A bold bear will have her head in your bag before you get back in your car. It can be OK to fed bears (guys put out stale doughnuts for the hunt), but not where people hang, and gnats and porcupines can be a major annoyance (and this year the skeeters are passing horse encephalitis and such).
I could see soiled cans in bug-tight plastic bags but the local recyclers are leaning away from ANY plastic bags. Strangles the ducks.
You do not see drink debris along Maine highways. For decades there has been a 5 cent deposit. Not everybody will bother for a nickle but a LOT of low-cash people get orange vests and sharp sticks and patrol the ditches. You see sofas and tree-rot and plastic toys, but not deposit bottles/cans. Stores who sell such stuff are loosely required to give-back the refunds, from any store; but they can also contract with independent Redemption agents so it isn't like trading trash for candy.
This is a State program. 4 of the 6 nearest states mostly agree on the 5 cents but two don't have any such program. I understand there is some friction along the borders, more bottles refunded than sold in the state (one couple accused of actually importing bottles).
what's the probability of my saving all the wrappers from the Kitkats and other products so I can take back to a supermarket?
Low, from the sound of it.
Top tip: we put our "recycle at the supermarket" bags into one of the reusable shopping bags which we take to the supermarket, which are kept near the bin. At the end of a shopping trip we walk the 5-10 steps from the checkout to the recycling cage and drop them in.
Romesh Ranganathan did a travel documentary to Rwanda. What struck me, and he also brought it up, was that there was NO litter. No matter where he went there was nothing on the ground.
I think it was once a month that they had national clean up Saturday. Everyone had to help out.
I live in the Netherlands, and it's just the same here like back home in the UK - shit everywhere!
Yes, I seem to remember the statistic is that 90% of all river-borne plastic that ends up in the ocean comes from just 10 rivers, eight of them in Asia. If that doesn't stop, then it seems like cleaning the GPGP up will be a bit futile, as it will soon be replaced by GPGP 2.0. Worth a shot anyway, I suppose.
In particular - and should be extremely worrying to everyone - a good chunk of that is abandoned/lost driftnets - which have been illegal to use virtually _everywhere_ since the 1990s. Older ones could be up to 50 miles long
Whilst the rest of the plastic is a major problem, there's a reason these were called "death walls" by campaigners back in the 1980s
Fishing industry waste accounts for 48,000 tons of oceanic plastic per year - and that _doesn't_ include those lost ghost nets - which make up about 10% of the total plastic but in all likelihood account for 80-90% of the wildlife killed by plastics in the seas (fish, mammals, invertibrates, seabirds and even the occasional diver!)
I'm quite disappointed in my fellow USAmericans. First, their political and societal savvy seems...less than I would have hoped, and second, at some point, it seems to have become stylish to throw whatever they no longer want, out the window of their cars.
I was taught by my parents, not to litter, to put the trash in my pocket or hold onto it until we got home. Not everyone, it seems, had the same advantages as i did. I often wonder if the realise that it costs tax dollars to pick up their discards, or that the trash along the roadsides decreases the value of their property?
And hope they succeed. But I do have a couple of questions:
- what do they do with the plastic they remove? Hopefully a lot of it can be recycled?
- is there an ecosystem associated with the patch, similarly to the plants and animals living in/on the Sargasso weeds? And if so, what happens to them? Or is the plastic more of a menace than a place to live?
Just curious...
I don't know what their plan is, but considering that stuff is well mixed and of very low value I expect the best way to deal with it is to burn it. The heat could be used to generate electricity, and of course the smoke would go though scrubbers to clean it up.
There's very little point in investing huge sums of money to turn a low value waste product into a low value usable product
The oil (fuel) consumption associated with collecting waste in plastic recycling schemes alone is usually several multiples of what it took to create the plastics in the first place
Unless and until oil is vastly more valuable than it is now (most plastics are made from oil and it accounts for 1-2% of total global consumption) there's little incentive to spend 100-200 times as much on recycling schemes as the value of the final product - and when it does become more expensive, manufacturing will simply switch to other base stock, such as corn starches
Recycling is the LAST step along the chain. Jumping to it as the first step is a nice bit of greenwashing that industry has been using for decades - and quite frankly it makes more sense to use plastics as a sidestream fuel in gas fired power stations or cement kilns than any other use (Hot enough to ensure complete combustion, unlike most other incinerations methods)
Regarding the "10 rivers" myth - just because the waste originates in upstream reachs of those rivers doesn't change that the origin is predominantly in those regions.
Targetting cultural practices would have a huge effect. I've sat on the Irrawaddy river 200 miles from the delta, watching plastic bags drift past and locals tossing the rubbish in at the banks beside major tourist attractions. The attitude is "the river cleans itself", etc and whilst there are endless TV campaigns specifically targetting the practice of dumping everything over a convenient ledge, the 20 foot high waste piles around many Yangon apartment buildings demonstrates that this isn't working
It most definitely does. I believe that Humans, as a species, need to stop just doing whatever because of immediate satisfaction.
We have a responsibility, due to our absolute ability to get stuff done. Bears shit in the woods ? We can remove the forest if we feel like it. We're doing that in some places on this planet. We need to better understand the consequences of our actions.
We're supposed to be intelligent. When I see someone throwing a cigarette butt out of a car window, I wonder if that is really true. We act like none of our actions have any consequence. A cigarette butt ? It's nothing. Out the window it goes. But it is something, we just don't realize exactly what the consequences are.
We need to learn the consequences of our everyday lives, and adapt to the better side of those consequences.
It's for our own good. Because reading that 75% of Italian mothers have microplastics in their breast milk is something that really does not sound good to me.
It is, however, the consequence of our own ignorance.
So stop being ignorant and do something about it.
That is true. But left alone, those big chunks of plastic will turn into microplastics over time. Another good point here is to avoid all the 'fast fashion' or 'ultrafast fashion' and instead buy some quality clothing that isn't made of plastic. Overall it will probably be cheaper over time as well.
A sidenote there: I run a lot, and use and obviously wash a lot of running/sports clothes. Over time I've found you can get woollen runing clothes, not just plastic-based ones. They're more comfortable, not necessarily any warmer than the other kind - and an unexpected bonus is that it doesn't smell like wet dog after every use. It seems to hold up better over time as well.
I don't run, but have been known to ride my bicycle.
I find that 55% Hemp / 45% Cotton blend tee shirts are great for staying cool, and don't cling like a shower curtain when drenched, unlike cotton and synthetics. THTC is my go-to brand - organic, ethical, carbon neutral, etc.
Hemp is one of those "miracle" materials. A hell of a lot of R&D has gone into producing plastics to do the job that it used to and most of them barely match its versatility/durability
There's a common trope that whilst Reefer Madness had a large part in it, the 1930s prohibition on growing industrial hemp in the USA was driven by du Pont lobbying - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemp_in_the_United_States
Hemp fabrics have their downsides. If you have them when travelling you're extremely likely to be greeted by an enthusiastic beagle somewhere in airports worldwide (accompanied by a less friendly hooman) or find that your luggage's contents has been very thoroughly rearranged
I have a lot of Ronhill running kit, things like baselayers can be used for any sport and their shorts have cargo pockets which I like. Most of their stuff is made using bamboo fibres which gives it similar wicking and odour repellent properties to wool.
I just knew someone would be along to make this comment.
You need to take into account:
1. The planet survived a few millennia of herds of large feral herbivores.
2. OP referred to wool which comes from sheep which are not the same as cattle people get het up about.
3. Pasture represents a larger amount of stored carbon than annual crops. Converting it into tillage would release that.
4. The methane produced from the vegetable component of the human diet.
The overgrazing by the livestock insutry is a different set of problems to microplastics.
Basically, it all comes back to too many humans; cull a few billion and gain space for the transition to lower intensity farming.
The satirical laugh is that currently if we carry on as we are, we are on track for nature to perform that cull for us…
"Removing pasture enables rewilding of 75% of agricultural land,"
Let me guess. You live in a city and if you ever stop to think where your food comes from your answer is "the shop".
Also pasture is a good deal more floristically diverse than crop. If you can take a trip to any sheep-grazed chalk grassland take a good flora* with you, measure out a square metre and see how many different species you can find in it. That was one of the introductory exercises at the start of my botany degree 60+ years ago. Acid grassland is rather less so but still pretty diverse.
Your "rewilding" from tillage usually relies on a level of grazing to keep the ranker grasses from shading out the more interesting plants. Mowing is possible but grazing requires less use of machinery which is less discriminating and possibly more damaging.
* Plant identification book
There is a nice paper here about the relationship between managed pasture and biodiversity.
“pasture may be on the verge of a dramatic expansion in emerging economies, with potentially disastrous consequences for biodiversity”
“the status quo is not an option”
"The livestock industry is far more of a problem than microplastics."
How is that relevant? Removing or reducing the livestock industry isn't going to solve the <micro)plastics pollution problem.
Whataboutism at it's best. What do you suggest? We form an international committee to spend the next three decades arguing over the ranking of the worlds problems so we can then all deal with them, one at a time, starting from the top? How do you resolve the issue of problems moving up and down the ranking process while the process is still ongoing? Or new and bigger problems we don't yet know about? If we start with PROBLEM#1 and partially mitigate it so it ranks at No.2, do we then leave that one and put all our resources into solving the new No'1? Maybe we'll have to form another international committee to look at the rules the first committee must follow. That should only take another few decades.
I think the point was that microplastics can be reduced by substituting natural fibres including wool for synthetics but that the OP is one of what seems to be a community of animal haters which thinks that the herbivores which have long formed part of the pre-industrial and, indeed, pre-human fauna of the planet are somehow a threat to it. It's not so much whataboutism as rejecteverythingism.
You're not wrong and I agree with you...but...
The trouble is that although humans do have intelligence, it's not our primary driver. Instead we are mostly (averages, Law of Large Numbers) first selfish, then lazy, and then (eventually) intelligent (sometimes).
I mean, look at us right now: we could be out picking up trash and making the world a better place, but instead we're lounging around talking about why no one is out picking up trash and making the world a better place.
We're doing this on short-lived electronic devices that, as a group, require vast extraction of rare and hard to access materials, have a voracious thirst for generated electricity, and offer an average first-user lifespan of 3.5 years...after which they too - and too often - become...trash.
Soylent Green is People*. So is pollution.
-----
* From the movie, not the extant, appalling, ostensible food substitute.
I've been following this project since the start and am thrilled to see it come to the fruition it promised originally. A bit like the "reforesting the Sahara" project in my eyes, it's one of the big environmental wins that can be had today that seems to fit a slightly more "repair" approach than to change what we're currently doing en-masse (like changing power generation methods or propulsion technologies). I'm genuinely excited about it and really happy they're getting the traction they need - hopefully the investment follows.
I've seen some of their other solutions, such as placing collection technologies at the mouth of some of the most contributing rivers and collecting stuff before it hits the oceans too.
I for one wonder if quietly offering some of the oldest or most interesting plastics found in their collections back to their original manufacturers for a sizeable donation would be a strong business model. The Ocean Cleanup Project gains some funds, some plastics are removed, and the removed items can either be placed in the corporation's respective museums (if they're ballsy and want to own it), or for those genuinely minded to do better, put on display in a pedestal or glass cabinet somewhere near their exec teams and ESG functions. Anything not quietly purchased by the corporations could be turned in to an exhibition that could tour major cities (London, LA, NYC, Beijing, Sydney, etc) for a month at a time, and funds from ticket sales could be used to further the project? Each tour section could have a specially-curated regional section, such as China seeing brands that are local to the far East highlighted in promotional materials and curated at the entrance. *Really* ballsy companies could pay *and* leave their interesting pieces in charge of the exhibition to help people understand why lobbing stuff in the nearest river isn't a great call.
I know I was morbidly fascinated when recently I tackled our huge hedge and pulled out a 1977 special-edition Matey bottle (genuinely) so would be interested to see what they'd found *and which companies stuff was part of it*.
FWIW, another commenter asked about 2nd/3rd world and why it's an issue. There are myraid first-world-being-a-problem things so I don't want to seem high and mighty here - I know enough global issues stem from everywhere. Seems for my understanding there's a "someone else will sort this" food chain sort of mindset in some parts. Some are rich enough that they can throw waste wherever knowing that someone else will collect all the plastic to go weigh it in as their job. Similarly, first-world bin placement and sanitation efforts are usually stronger across the spectrum, whereas they're weaker in poorer areas where civic funds are harder to come by: placing and emptying bins isn't as much a priority when children are starving and money could be spent on that. I doubt we'd get the UK to stand a Japanese attitude, where there are no bins and you *will* take your rubbish to your home or workplace. How to tackle the civic change, I don't know, but until done, fostering beach-clean-up crews and placing river-mouth collection goes a long way to improve things.
We quite often see various exhibitions on the south bank here in Nodnol that highlight the plight of various cultures / animals / buildings etc. Furthermore, when the Tate first opened, it had an exhibition of everything they'd pulled out of the Thames when building the Clipper pier (which I did, and still do find more interesting than anything else that's been in there)
We have to highlight this And we have to educate. And educate. And educate. And Punish
(I don't know if anyone else noticed the high amount of fishing nets that were encasing the turtles)
One of the biggest problems (nets) could be partially solved by mandating that they're made of biodegradable materials, or of something that will fall out of the water column once the floats rot off (it has to be intrinsically heavier than water, not just weighted. Abandoned Driftnets have had a tendency to sink when full of dead critters, only to pop back up to the pelagic zone once the contents have rotted down/been cleaned up by bottom dwelling crustaceans, etc) and that floats are mandated to have a limited lifespan before dissolving or breaking and sinking to the bottom
The saga of driftnets in the Mediterranean is an interesting cat-and-mouse story: Fishermen & manufacturers have repeatedly simply iterated their nets to _just_ fall outside defining legislation, whilst challenging laws which would have broader coverage (including outright bans on driftnetting and laws which generally define driftnets by their intended or practical use instead of the ones which have "merely" legislated mesh size and reduced net lengths to a mile or so)
One of the events in the backstory of Cryptonomicon was the sinking of an illegal fishing vessel by environmental activists. This has actually started happening - but the sinkers are the authorities, because they found that seized vessels which were auctioned off simply ended up back in the hands of the illegal operators. IIRC the French seized/sold one vessel in the Indian ocean 7-8 times over a period of 2 decades
It's a nice idea, but most plastics sink. They're only dealing with the superficial, immediately visible problem, like we usually do. For the money they spent on it, they could have developed better technologies to clean up the small upstream rivers the plastics are coming from (~95% according to two studies in 2018 and 2020). Unless we deal with it at the source, we're just going to keep making new garbage patches and losing the majority of plastics under the surface. Not to mention the harm the plastics do in the rivers as well.
Which ultimately not producing the muck in the first place.
Plastics weren't really a thing until after WW2 so really they can only have been "indispensable" for seventy years and within living memory.
Even in my childhood containers were glass and wrapping was (waxed) paper or cellophane. Revisiting some old technologies in the light more recent chemistry could produce far more environmentally friendly solutions. I can imagine materials based on biological waxes and (modified) cellulose could displace a large proportion of gratuitous plastics usage on cost alone.
Anyway icecream did taste better from a waxed cardboard carton. ;)
Curiously I recall these cartons being referred to as a quart which would have been 2 imperial pints or 40 imp. fl.oz. but I remember they were only about 1 litre so were probably 2 US pints - an oddity in our remote but very British corner of the Empire.
As much as I appreciate and support what Ocean Cleanup is doing, this is the only realistic solution. Plastics are not recyclable and never were, and no amount of innovation will make them sustainable.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/sep/09/us-voters-distrust-plastics-manufacturers-claims
"Research published earlier this year found that plastic producers have known for decades that plastic recycling is too cumbersome and expensive to ever become a feasible waste management solution, but promoted it to the public anyway."
"In fact, just 5% of plastic waste generated by US households in 2021 was recycled, one study found."
This is figure is not a result of people not sending plastic to be recycled, it is the result of plastic being expensive to recycle at best if not literally impossible to reuse in new products after the first generation.
Its bonkers. I want to build a fence and I looked at recycled plastic posts and they are about twice the price of wood. So no sane person wants to buy them. Same for recycled plastic decking boards.
Surely there is a glut of feed stock for these products so why isn't the price lower than wood?
Given what I've been seeing in my DIY stores locally, the plastic one is actually likely to last a while. I've seen the average wooden one rot out in less than 5 years and the flimsy metal ones be destroyed by storm gusts
I'd be willing to pick that a large part of the price difference is because the plastic shed kits are HEAVIER + bulkier and therefore cost more to ship to stores
Yes there's a glut of feedstock but the harsh reality is that COLLECTION and sorting costs alone result in a waste product that's significantly more expensive than virgin plastics
It's not at all uncommon to burn a couple of litres of fuel in order to recover plastics which only needed a litre of crude oil to make in the first place
It makes more sense to use a low value oil-derived waste product as supplementary fuel or figure out what products these plastics can be raw material for, rather than simply trying to turn plastic into plastic
Humans are really bad for their habit of "target fixation" - as we see with the blind insistence on windmills/solar despite there being plenty of evidence that in practical terms they CAN'T produce enough energy to replace carbon emitting power sources, let alone tackle the carbon emissions which don't come from electrical generation (about twice as much as our electrical-related emissions), coupled with a kneejerk "nooo-cle-arrr BAAAD" mentality(*)
Adopting a "sackcloth and ashes" lifestyle would actually INCREASE our carbon emissions and I can't see anyone who advocates culling 90% of the population being popular overall (Pol Pot tried this approach, see how much of a sucess he is today)
(*) The existing nuclear "uranium rods" stuff is a direct result of weapons research and dependent on weapons making waste products (1kg of "reactor fuel" is made for every 9kg of weapons plutonium feedstock and in the 1950s the processing sites had tens of tons of the stuff they wanted ot get rid of).
That suits weapons makers just fine and attempts to move to systems and fuels which aren't beholden to the weapons cycle were killed in the 1970s because they were a direct threat to the treaty protection of uranium "enrichment" plants.
Even today, the USA studiously avoids mentioning depleted uranium (which is the feedstock for weapons) when talking about "enrichment facilities" in Iran and focusses exclusively on the enriched stuff they have (which isn't weapons grade and the Iranians aren't stupid enough to spend $2-3 billion apiece on U235 weapons anyway), because it would bring a focus back on their own sites and cause people to start asking why there are hundreds of thousands of tons of depleted uranium sitting under armed guard in USA military facilities when it's the enriched stuff which is supposedly the weapons source
Umm, the thing about depleted uranium is that it's depleted...
Its use in weapons is because it's hard and dense, and as a waste product of uranium enrichment, it is relatively cheap, compared to, say, Tungsten, which is the other preferred material for making armour piercing projectiles (and which has lots of other uses, placing it in demand and thus making it expensive).
DU, being depleted, is of no use whatsoever for making nuclear weapons (and has a level of radioactivity that I think is about on par with a lump of Cornish Granite).
If DU is sitting under armed guard, it is only because most military organisations put armed guards on their armouries and ammunition storage areas.
"harsh reality is that COLLECTION and sorting costs"
Collecting and sorting the recycling I put in my bin is included in my council tax payments. This doesn't cover recycling from businesses but again they will pay their waste removal service. So that part of the process is already mostly paid for.
I'm probably from that remote corner of the former empire
We always regarded _anything_ which mentioned quarts as based on US measurements, but I'm pretty sure that just like "Manchester" became the generic term for fabric "on-the-roll" (department stores of old would always have a "manchester department"), "quart" for ice cream in particular was a marketing term leftover from when the USA rabble were crawling all over the place on shore leave
I get it, most of these attempts are poorly disguised VC-harvesting tools.
But this lot have already designed, built, and tested river interceptors. The first one was years ago. And they're still developing and deploying them. And trying to persuade cities to stop dumping truckloads of garbage in rivers after collection.
Ocean Cleanup and their partners actually seem to care about solving this, and they're doing a good job.
"But this lot have already designed, built, and tested river interceptors"
The Indonesian government started doing this over 30 years ago (which matters, because around 10% of all plastic waste seems to originate in Indonesian rivers) and other national governments have been following suit over time, however an interceptor in a river like the Irradwaddy (which is over half a mile wide and swift flowing for the last 200 miles of its course) isn't practical as it would be destroyed by the current as soon as it collected enough material to act as any kind of flow barrier (if not on day one, then during monsoon season when flow peaks)
Imagine the practicalities of putting a river interceptor in the lower reaches of the Mississippi or Nile...
They've done some VERY small scale work and have extrapolated to reach their conclusion. I think it would be a lot easier if they said "we can remove 1/10th of it with $1 billion" (higher than 1/10th of $7.5 billion as I assume there are some fixed startup costs) and then they'd have an easier time raising the full amount to do the whole thing.
Then there's the question of how much it will cost to continue to clean it. Because it isn't like cleaning the garbage patch will be the end of it. There is plenty of plastic floating around that is I suppose "on its way" to the garbage patch, and plenty of new pollution will enter the oceans in the future. So it will be an ongoing project. I guess the one good thing about this, if you can call it that, is that currents collect a lot of the plastic entering the oceans in a single spot. If it was all floating around randomly it would be totally infeasible to remove from the oceans, you could only clean up what washes up on coastlines - and that is a WAY bigger project!
Large chunks - I read that bit in conjunction with the comment that large chunks of plastic dating from the 60s were also being recovered. The implication being that solid plastic waste in the ocean does not break up into microplastics even over long periods of time. That's good and bad: good that larger waste stays as larger waste and can be cleaned-up using this process; bad because it means that microplastics is a different problem and needs to be addressed by another project using another approach.
I can think of a Tory crony who trousered £34billion for a _failed_ job that cost the Germans €5million to implement sucessfully
Magic money trees exist and the concept of money itself is a very fluid item when it comes to national-scale budgets
EG the "money" given to Ukraine doesn't go to Ukraine, it stays in whichever country is making the donation(*) - virtually all "overseas aid" money actually goes to LOCAL entities who get paid to do a job in the target area or comes with strings attached ensuring that it can only be spent with suppliers from the source country
(*) And in the particular case of Ukraine, it's cheaper to give them our old junk than it is to pay to dispose of it locally. It's a military version of the containers of plastic waste which used to go to China, except more directly useable by the recipients (Even the F16s are near end-of-life airframes which were due to be grounded/scrapped in the near future)
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