Before Miriam posted her most excellent explanation of what the North Pacific Trash Gyre really looks like, I had a vision for how to clean it up: A multinational fleet of mighty ships, their prows split wide open to admit the polluted sea water, slurping it up into giant filters to pick up the plastic, and spitting out clean ocean out the back. I can see them trawling back and forth over the ocean until, eventually, some bearded guy in a yellow rain slicker and a sou’wester wipes his brow, turns to his first mate and says, “Ayuh, we finished cleanin’ the watah.” And then Miriam posted, and I learned just how difficult cleaning up a Texas-sized ocean of trash with plastic at multiple depths really would be. Alas.
So how do we fix it? Over at Blogfish, Mark Powell lined up three proposed solutions: more recycling of plastic, ban the worst products, or a massive reorganization of our economy. In the comments, someone proposes plankton trawls, which is pretty close to my vision big ocean filtering boats. Unfortunately, there are serious problems with all of these ideas: banning the worst plastics might reduce the growth of the trash heap, but it won’t exactly clean up the mess itself. Same problem with recycling. I’m still keen on the trawl/ocean sucking barge idea, but there is that pesky problem of bycatch, in that you’d filter out any fish or plankton living in a marine area larger than Texas.
But then I recalled something about microbes that eat oil, when we have massive oil spills. Well, heck, plastic is made of hydrocarbons, right? Maybe there’s something that can eat plastic.
And thus I enter the fabulous world of bioremediation, the notion that we can fix biological problems with other bits of biology, most commonly by using bacteria to turn something toxic or polluting into something non-toxic or non-polluting. Back in 2005, Spanish scientists studied microbes that ate oil after a major spill off the Spanish coast. And recently some University College Dublin scientists evolved a bacteria to eat polystyrene, the main ingredient in styrofoam.
Now there’s companies that specialize in this stuff. A clean-up company called Ecochem claims you can use micorbes to clean up everything from the MTBE added to gasoline to fuel and oil spills that have seeped into the earth. I also found a fungus that eats certain hard-to-recylce plastic resins that get used in particle board and cars. So that seems promising, but I’m not sure fungus will do all that well in the water.
So, I’m afraid my search came up short, which isn’t too surprising, because if there was a plastic-eating microbe out there, we probably would have already set it to work on our landfills, let alone the gyre. Still, I have to think that if bacteria eat oil and styrofoam, then we can’t be too far off from finding one that will help us along with our plastics clean up. In the meantime, maybe those giant trawlers aren’t such a terrible idea?
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May 15, 2008 at 3:28 pm |
If there is a fungus that can do it, then you can probably engineer something that could do it in water as well. So, yeah.
June 28, 2009 at 7:13 am |
There is no one solution. Everything, even if its not the best idea needs to be started now. Inertia will be broken by action which will promote innovations
May 19, 2008 at 10:57 am |
The main concern is the introduction of any bio-engineered organism into the natural environment. We have very little concept of how it may behave or it’s side effects. Hopefully we will do the right amount of due-dilligence.
May 21, 2008 at 7:20 am |
Hey Oysters Garter,
Great blog! Appreciate your looking into the cleanup feasibility….I recently returned from a 4,000 mile research voyage through the gyre, and now “get” why the cleanup idea is so challenging. Its truly massive, and the debris VERY spread out…..Just wrote about it here.
You all should come up June 1st for the launch of Junk, a raft built of 15,000 plastic bottles, headed for Hawaii….love to have you there!
May 22, 2008 at 8:34 am |
Thanks for the invite, Anna! Sadly, we will be somewhere over the Midwest that day as we fly back from the East Coast.
May 24, 2008 at 4:07 am |
Introduction of bio-engineered organisms is definitely a tricky proposition. I spend a lot of time trying to think of ways to engineer in an “off” switch, but I recognize the limitations of that as well (like what if the organism mutates to escape the “off” switch). My point is, it is a long way from what can be done in the lab to having something that would actually be useful in the real world and I should be careful not to leave the impression that we don’t know that.
August 16, 2008 at 10:05 am |
Aloha
Great to see that the minds are thinking on how to clean up the North Pacific Gyre. It needs to be addressed, soon. We can all agree that it needs to be done. It will take a world of people to clean it up. After all it took a world of people to make the mess. It’s not so important that we know how at this very moment, but to get started. We are forming a non profit to do the cleanup and we could use your time, effort and expertise. What ever it may be.
I look forward to the journey, this will be one of the greatest undertakings in history.
Aloha
Rich
October 9, 2008 at 12:25 pm |
hello i am a 15 year old student at Kihei charter school on Maui. I was reading your blog and decided to do a little research of my own and i think that i have found that plastic eating microbe that you are looking for. Only catch is that the optimal degrading temperature is about 43 degrees. Take a look at the website
http://news.therecord.com/article/354044
May 5, 2009 at 4:30 pm |
A possible means to clean up the mess would be to create solar powered trawlers that would slowly collect the debris. Slow movement could reduce the bycatch of animals. Perhaps the plastic catch could be dragged on deck and melted together, or bound togther with a bailing type mechanism. The system should melt plastic on board and make the bailing material. If it would not pose a leeching problem it coul dbe floated to form a bigger remediation island.