Those magnificent men with their plastic cleanup machines
James Dyson, of vacuum cleaner fame, is designing a giant vacuum boat to clean up ocean plastic pollution. I'm wondering how long he's had such a plan in the pipeline. Years? Or has he just thought of this since media attention has focused so acutely on ocean plastic pollution after the recent disappearance of the Malaysian Airlines plane?
Is he aware of Dutch wunderkind, Boyan Slat's proposed array to do a very similar job just last year? Or is he aware that similar machines are proposed every few years or so?
Like so many of these schemes, Dyson's is still at concept stage (which seems to mean, sketch). As he says, "the concept is the easy bit! It would need to be prototyped, tested, and refined and that’s the hard part".
When I first heard of such machines, I felt a sense of excitement, mixed with equal amounts of doubt. Mixed emotions. As mentioned in a previous post, it's easy to think, "great, it's solved. Now we can all use plastic guilt-free".
Maybe that will have to be the way we go. Just accept that the convenience genie is out the bottle and we need to clean up after people; that personal responsibility and behaviour won't change this problem, nor will corporate initiatives, because the corporate drive is to make money at any cost. Well. That's just a bit depressing!
Australian Broadcasting Corporation's environment website posits the question, Is Boyan Slat's Idea... Fatally Flawed. The writer argues that:
Slat's idea is at odds with the sheer scale of the ocean and the complex problem we are causing. It is buffeted by the harsh, inexorable critique that reality imposes on any high concept trying to make its way out into the world from CAD programs and slick animated screens. Architects know this struggle. Not everyone thinks the array concept is a good one or thoroughly conceived. Some say it could even be a well-intended but harmful sideshow.
Stiv Wilson, of 5 Gyres Institute says (of Slat, but it could equally be applied to this or any scheme):
Read around on this a little, particularly articles by oceanographers and ocean pollution researchers, and you start to detect a slightly jaded tone. They say they come across such schemes every other year. Here's a tiny list of just a few:
Manuel Maqueda, Co-founder of the Plastic Pollution Coalition says:
If I had a dime for each brilliant idea to “clean up the Garbage Patch” that has been forwarded to me over the last few years I would be a millionaire.
He goes on to say:
Ironically, some commentators have used the analogy of a vacuum to highlight the very absurdity of ocean cleanup schems. Stiv Wilson said of Boyan Slat's proposal at the time:
"It's like trying to pull the smog out of Los Angeles by holding a vacuum cleaner in the air."
And more recently, after Australia's national science agency, CSIRO released their study of microplastic on Australian beaches, ecologist Chris Wilcox said in an article about cleanups:
Further reading
Like so many of these schemes, Dyson's is still at concept stage (which seems to mean, sketch). As he says, "the concept is the easy bit! It would need to be prototyped, tested, and refined and that’s the hard part".
When I first heard of such machines, I felt a sense of excitement, mixed with equal amounts of doubt. Mixed emotions. As mentioned in a previous post, it's easy to think, "great, it's solved. Now we can all use plastic guilt-free".
Maybe that will have to be the way we go. Just accept that the convenience genie is out the bottle and we need to clean up after people; that personal responsibility and behaviour won't change this problem, nor will corporate initiatives, because the corporate drive is to make money at any cost. Well. That's just a bit depressing!
Australian Broadcasting Corporation's environment website posits the question, Is Boyan Slat's Idea... Fatally Flawed. The writer argues that:
Slat's idea is at odds with the sheer scale of the ocean and the complex problem we are causing. It is buffeted by the harsh, inexorable critique that reality imposes on any high concept trying to make its way out into the world from CAD programs and slick animated screens. Architects know this struggle. Not everyone thinks the array concept is a good one or thoroughly conceived. Some say it could even be a well-intended but harmful sideshow.
Stiv Wilson, of 5 Gyres Institute says (of Slat, but it could equally be applied to this or any scheme):
there's a kind of hubris in the design world that we can create any problem and design our way out of it rather than finding ways of not using the crap in the first place.
Read around on this a little, particularly articles by oceanographers and ocean pollution researchers, and you start to detect a slightly jaded tone. They say they come across such schemes every other year. Here's a tiny list of just a few:
- Project Kasei's Capturing the Plastic Vortex
- The drone
- The pod
- Recycled Island
- Boyan Slat's Ocean Cleanup Array
- James Dyson's giant vacuum
- Spherical Underwater Fish Tower
Manuel Maqueda, Co-founder of the Plastic Pollution Coalition says:
If I had a dime for each brilliant idea to “clean up the Garbage Patch” that has been forwarded to me over the last few years I would be a millionaire.
He goes on to say:
The inconvenient truth is that we are using plastic, a toxic and very durable material that lasts centuries, for packaging and single use applications, that is to create things ... designed to become garbage after a short use. And we are doing this at a massive scale to the benefit of a few corporations, to the detriment of all.
The plastic industry loves distractions like the cleaning machines, because they put the focus on “cleaning up”, not on how their business of making disposable plastics is destroying the planet. We have created a spiraling consumer culture and then turned it into a throwaway culture. Unless you stop this first, “cleanups” are futile.
I'd really like to be positive about such inventions. At least these people are proposing solutions, not just whingeing about the situation. Who knows, something might come of one of these ideas one day; I'd hate to think they were just "naysayed" into oblivion. Think of all the great inventions where that has happened throughout history. Some seemingly crazy ideas have now become standards in our modern society.
But then I have to balance that view when I read opinion pieces by people a lot more "in the know" on this issue than me.
Stiv Wilson, of 5 Gyres Institute, says:
Stiv Wilson, of 5 Gyres Institute, says:
It’s a great story, but it’s just a story. I find debating with gyre cleanup advocates akin to trying to reason with someone who will argue with a signpost and take the wrong way home. Gyre cleanup is a false prophet hailing from La-La land that won’t work – and it’s dangerous and counter productive to a movement trying in earnest stop the flow of plastic into the oceans. Gyre cleanup plays into the hand of industry, but worse, it diverts attention and resources from viable, but unsexy, multi-pronged and critically vetted solutions.
"It's like trying to pull the smog out of Los Angeles by holding a vacuum cleaner in the air."
And more recently, after Australia's national science agency, CSIRO released their study of microplastic on Australian beaches, ecologist Chris Wilcox said in an article about cleanups:
"If we are doubling what we are putting into the ocean on a ten-year basis, there's no way to keep up. It would be as if you were vacuuming your living room, and I'm standing at the doorway with a bag of dust and a fan. You can constantly keep vacuuming, but you could never catch up."
Related posts
Related posts
- http://www.abc.net.au/environment/articles/2013/12/16/3911379.htm
- http://inhabitat.com/the-fallacy-of-cleaning-the-gyres-of-plastic-with-a-floating-ocean-cleanup-array/5-gyres-ocean-plastic-pollution-4/
- http://kumu.cc/2013/03/27/those-crazy-plastic-cleaning-machines/
- http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/04/140414-ocean-garbage-patch-plastic-pacific-debris/#close-modal
Brilliant post, you put my thoughts on the issues down in a much more well written way than I ever could.
ReplyDeleteHello Dan, this is really an informative article you have shared here on Plastic cleanup machines. Right! I got the picture as you written in detail here. Thanks for sharing such a nice writing.
ReplyDeleteThank you for what you are sharing very helpful :)
ReplyDeleteYes, We need to clean up...
ReplyDelete