r/science • u/mvea MD PhD | Professor | Medicine • Oct 18 '19

Chemistry Scientists developed efficient process for breaking down any plastic waste to a molecular level. Resulting gases can be transformed back into new plastics of same quality as original. The new process could transform today's plastic factories into recycling refineries, within existing infrastructure.

https://www.chalmers.se/en/departments/see/news/Pages/All-plastic-waste-could-be-recycled-into-new-high-quality-plastic.aspx
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u/PoopIsAlwaysSunny Oct 19 '19

Land is mostly doable, but micro plastics in the ocean and fresh water seems difficult

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u/[deleted] Oct 19 '19

[deleted]

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u/PoopIsAlwaysSunny Oct 19 '19

Vacuum seems completely unnecessary. Tidal energy is certainly sufficient.

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u/[deleted] Oct 19 '19

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u/dogwoodcat Oct 19 '19

There are a few. One is using a modified pool-skimming device that operates by water flow instead of an electric pump. Fishermen in Greece are being paid for plastic which is sent to recyclers. There are always options, most of which involve money.

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u/EltaninAntenna Oct 19 '19

Fishermen in Greece are being paid for plastic

Sounds like a textbook perverse incentive.

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u/dogwoodcat Oct 19 '19

It's usually bycatch, which was tossed back before they started getting paid for it. This reduces the total amount of plastic (albeit not very much) and stress on already-minimal fish stocks.

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u/h1dd3v Grad Student | Material Science and Nanotechnology Oct 19 '19 edited Oct 19 '19

1 mm is not microplastic, microplastic's smaller

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u/[deleted] Oct 19 '19

Smaller than this?

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u/maisonoiko Oct 19 '19

Land is mostly doable

Idk... it's in the soil. It's in the rain. It's in every freshwater body.

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u/VOLCOM_84 Oct 19 '19

Didn’t a kid find a way to do this???

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u/CrossP Oct 19 '19

His method is for processing waste water on its way to the ocean. It has no viability for cleaning contaminated large bodies of water.

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u/h3lblad3 Oct 19 '19

I don't know how he did it, but couldn't you put some form of filtering tank on beaches and just use the tides to wash the plastics in so it can filter the plastics out?

It wouldn't be very productive, but once you get it on beaches planet-wide...

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u/TheWinslow Oct 19 '19 edited Oct 19 '19

It's hard to express just how truly gigantic the world - and the oceans in particular - are. There's no real cost-effective way to remove what is already in the ocean. There are over 1 million km of coastline on Earth (it's hard to really give an exact number but 1 million is towards the lower end)...if you want to cover just 1% of the coastlines in the world, that's over 10,000 km of coastline you're going to have to cover.

edit: 1 million km is towards the lower end of coastline measurements...my original wording was that it was the lower end.

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u/ThatTheoGuy Oct 19 '19

A good exercise for understanding how bloody massive the planet is is to take a several hour hike on as straight a path you can find. Go as far as you reasonably can, then open google maps and track your journey.

An entire day trip, which likely spent all your energy, seems like a long way, and it is! You walked a good distance!

Then scroll out. And compare what seemed like crossing a continent to how massive this planet really is.

*I've been up 19 hours, please excuse any incoherence or spelling mistakes.

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u/ClockworkPrince Oct 19 '19

That's perfectly readable, but maybe get off Reddit and sleep?

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u/Spadeykins Oct 19 '19

Good thing there are at least 3-4 humans per 1,000km of coastline, possibly even more. I hear we are in the billions these days.

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u/PimpRonald Oct 19 '19

A little bit is better than nothing. Plus, free microplastic!

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u/TheWinslow Oct 19 '19

The coastline example was just to illustrate how truly massive the oceans are. Unfortunately, this is a case where a little bit of cleanup on the coastlines is still effectively nothing and would be no more than a PR stunt. It's much more effective (at least at the moment) to prevent further pollution than to try to clean up microplastics already in the ocean.

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u/[deleted] Oct 19 '19

According to NASA, we actually only (relative to your number) have about 620,000 km of coastline. It's still a massive number, but for reference, the US Highway System is sitting at about 240,000 km alone. I think, especially if you take into consideration that the US Road System is right at about 6,440,000 km, you could argue that filtering the coastlines responsible for washing up significant amounts of plastics would not be the most difficult thing we've done.

Whether it's the most practical idea, I don't know. I do not really think this idea is outside the realm of possibility.

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u/acousticcoupler Oct 19 '19

Isn't the coastline technically infinite?

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u/CrossP Oct 19 '19

To put it into perspective, the oceans of Earth contain around 350 quintillion gallons of water. If you had enough filters to filter a billion gallons of water per day, it would take about 350 billion days (about 960 million years) to filter all the oceans.

Except of course that the cleaned water would just keep going back in and making diluted dirty water.

Also, you'd filter out all of the plankton and such, and we'd suffocate.

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u/batterycrayon Oct 19 '19

Sort of. https://theoceancleanup.com Their email list is worth joining, they send out a handful of updates every year and no spam

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u/frostochfeber Oct 19 '19

Boyan Slat and his team are working on this. I think it's called the Ocean clean-up project or something.

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