Electronic cleaning of the Oceans:
According to National Geographic there is “5.25 Trillion Pieces and Counting” of trash in the oceans. In the Pacific Ocean there is a garbage mass that has been estimated to be the double the size of Texas. The thing with trash is no one wants it, so when it is hundreds of miles away in the ocean, no one is racing to go clean it all up. With technology making production of the trash easier, is their any technology helping get rid of the trash?
Introducing the Seabin project.
The SeaBin project was started by two friends who where surfers. One day they realized how much trash they swam and surfed into and had finally had enough. Their goal is to "Save the Ocean" by deploying their "Seabins". These Seabins are a combination of technology and passion to save the ocean.
How does it work?
"Water is sucked in from the surface and passes through a catch bag in side the Seabin, with a submersible water pump capable of displacing 25.000 Lph (liters per hour), plugged directly into 110/220 V outlet. The water is then pumped back into the marina leaving litter and debris trapped in the catch bag."
Look more into the Seabin at http://seabinproject.com/
Questions:
1.This is basic technology being used to help the environment, what other ways can you think of?
2. On a larger scale can you think of any way how connecting a processor that communicates to a database to these seabins could help clean up more sea trash?
Source:
http://www.slate.com/articles/video/video/2015/12/a_clever_new_automatic_ocean_trash_collection_system_called_the_seabin_is.html
http://seabinproject.com/
Hi Mark,
ReplyDeleteI am glad to see that people are creating new and interesting ways to clean our oceans! While reading this article I thought of a very interesting way that people reuse plastic water bottles. To answer your question, another technology that avoids plastic being dumped into the ocean is when we build homes with it! Over recent years, it has become very popular for homes to be built using recycled water bottles in impoverished areas. This is a great way to reuse materials, as well as provide very inexpensive shelter for people in need of refuge. In fact, even our university is currently collecting used bottles to build a greenhouse!
Taylor,
DeleteI never even thought about building with plastic. I have heard of park benches being made with plastic but not homes! thats a great idea!
These are such great ideas! Very creative! I have recently watched this documentary on TV and I'm shock how much plastic waste Americans produce everyday! One easy thing we can eliminate is also plastic straws! Their average life is 3 minutes, but they really built up to a huge amount with us using so frequently!
DeleteI saw a Facebook video of this a while back and thought wow what a great idea, why isn't that installed everywhere. I attempted to find how many Seabins had been sold in the last year but could not. However, I believe ideas like this should be a requirement to having in marinas, it benefits everyone at a very low cost.
ReplyDeleteThis was a very interesting post. It seems that there is a tremendous amount of plastic that is being thrown into our oceans that could of just been recycled. I believe another solution to this issue could be to reward people for recycling like they do for tin cans in California, rather than banning straws. I am not sure how straws could be eliminated other than being banned... which seems a bit extreme.
ReplyDeleteReally? Of the eight million tons of plastic trash that flow every year into the world’s oceans, the plastic drinking straw is surely not a top contributor to all that tonnage. Yet this small, slender tube, utterly unnecessary for most beverage consumption, is at the center of a growing environmental campaign aimed at convincing people to stop using straws to help save the oceans.
ReplyDeleteGive up plastic bags and straws. On the link below is a video of straw removal from a turtle. You can make a change rather than saying it's a problem. Starbucks isn't going to do anything about it, but you can.
See the full article at https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/04/plastic-straws-ocean-trash-environment/. Links embedded in this article are useful, too.