100k kg is just 100t. Why not just say 100t? Maybe because 100t out of 80,000t would not seem like much.<p>And, it wouldn't be. But if they can work out how to make the things reliable and affordable, deploying 10 of them that are each 10x bigger gets the patch cleaned up in 8 years. Provided we are not dumping that much in at the same rate.<p>I used to think that recycling plastic was dumb, because plastic in a landfill is carbon nicely sequestered. But apparently making new plastic burns several times that amount of carbon. So, even if the petroleum that would have been made into new plastic is instead cracked and burned for fuel, you still come out ahead by reusing it.
They estimate that there is around 80,000 tons (8e7 kg) of plastic in the patch, so they will have to scale up quite a lot to make any dent in it.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_garbage_patch#Size_estimates" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_garbage_patch#Si...</a>
Think of how much cheaper per kg it is to _prevent_ new plastic entering the ocean rather than pulling plastic from the middle of the ocean!<p>Why on earth are we pulling ~100s of kg while there is still 8.8 million tonnes entering the ocean each year?! [1]<p>aka Ocean Bound Plastic, I've seen a few products use it (but I don't know how to go about certification): <a href="https://www.hermanmiller.com/en_apc/better-world/sustainability/ocean-bound-plastic/" rel="nofollow">https://www.hermanmiller.com/en_apc/better-world/sustainabil...</a><p>[1]: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastic_pollution" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastic_pollution</a>
I'd like to see a sample of this garbage.<p>How much (by weight) is plastic? How much is seaweed? How much is ocean water which is stuck in the plastic now?<p>Things like a 1 gram bag could easily get 100 grams of weed growing on it, which absorbs 1kg of water. It's now very difficult to weigh that 1 gram which is now only 0.1% of the total mass.<p>It's also not obviously clear that removing the weed-covered bag from the environment is a good plan, if you're removing 100 grams of biomass for each gram of plastic removed.