There is a story that has been floating around the web about a 19 year old Dutch engineering student, Boyan Slat,  who, if you believe the claims, has figured out how to clean almost half of the Great Pacific garbage patch in only ten years. At the risk of sounding cynical, the first thing that came to mind was the “super-skimmer” A-Whale, a converted Ore-Bulk-Oiler which was supposed to have revolutionized oil spill clean-up, if only it had worked, which it didn’t.  Likewise, the operative question for Boyan Slat’s concept, is, will it work?

The Great Pacific garbage patch is the name given to floating mass of plastic and other waste caught in the Northern Pacific gyre, a huge circular current in the Northern Pacific.  Slat’s idea is to use a series of floating barriers anchored to the ocean floor to use the force of the current to filter and concentrate the plastic waste.

Boyan Slat: Why would you move through the oceans if the oceans can move through you?

There is considerable skepticism about whether Slat’s anchored arrays would work.

The average ocean depth beneath the North Pacific gyre is around 4,000 meters. Anchoring the large floating barriers in waters almost 2 nautical miles deep is a significant engineering problem. Also the plastic, which is photo-degraded and probably worthless for recycling, is widely dispersed over an area ranging from 700,000 square kilometres (270,000 sq mi) to more than 15,000,000 square kilometres (5,800,000 sq mi), depending on which estimates one uses.

Is Boyan Slat’s idea to clean plastic from the oceans fatally flawed?

The plastic soup is thin and the ocean is vast — far more so than fits comfortably in the public imagination.

 Stiv Wilson, policy and campaign director of the ocean conservation nonprofit group 5Gyres, recalls his first time seeing the garbage patch. “Imagine the night sky, no moon. No light. The stars represent the plastic on the water. Space is the ocean surface. That’s what it looks like,” he says. “Intermittently there are big objects, fishing gear or a Coke bottle or a hard hat.”

Everything, he says, is superdispersed. He’s very skeptical that we can just skim it out of the water. “It’s like trying to pull the smog out of Los Angeles by holding a vacuum cleaner in the air.”

Wilson is at pains not to get the knives out for Slat’s motives, however. “I think he’s trying to do something to solve a problem,” he says. “But 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.”

Other ocean researchers agree. “There’s really only one solution to this. That’s to stop plastics from getting into the ocean,” says Erik van Sebille, an oceanographer the University of South Wales.

THE OCEAN CLEANUP – Feasibility Study

Thanks to Alaric Bond for contributing to this post.