Sea Chair Project Harvests Plastic From the Oceans To Create Furniture 96
cylonlover writes "You may have heard about the huge floating islands of garbage swirling around in the middle of the Earth's oceans. Much of that waterlogged rubbish is made up of plastic and, like Electrolux with its concept vacuum cleaners, U.K.-based Studio Swine and Kieren Jones are looking to put that waste to good use. As part of an ambitious project, they've come up with a system to collect plastic debris and convert it into furniture. Rather than collecting plastic that washes ashore or is snagged as by-catch in fishing nets, the team hopes to one day go where the trash is, collect and convert it to something useful while still at sea. Sea Chair envisions adapting fishing boats into floating chair factories that trawl for plastic and put it into production on-board."
I see a problem... (Score:5, Interesting)
There is an online documentary on the 'floating garbage islands' somewhere. Not really islands. Just lots of little itty bits of plastic spread over a huuuuge area.
Since the plastic debris is spread thinly over a large large area, you'd need to blow through a fair bit of fuel to collect sufficient amounts of plastic to make a chair.
Doable? yes.
Economical? No.
Unless you could do this with a sailing boat, or a solar powered boat...and from the article...that boat doesn't look like either.
Re:I see a problem... (Score:3, Interesting)
Even worse, as I have read, the plastic bits are dispersed in a huge volume. Roughly one bit per cubic meter to depths in tens of meters.
Also, the amounts of plastic debris are not increasing because tiny crustaceans are drilling tunnels into the plastic and feasting on the rich carbs, safe inside their tough little homes.
Re:Why dont they just make the plastic out of... (Score:4, Interesting)
The same crap that cheap lawn chairs of made of, 1 year exposed to the elements and it crumbles into powder ... why do we need million year plastics to hold beer cans?
Plastics are a cocktail of chemicals.
One of the most important ingredients are UV stabilizers.
This single ingredient more or less dictates the functional lifespan of any plastic that is exposed to sunlight.
Once that UV stabilizer is consumed, UV will break down the plastic until its structural integrity fails.
The industry is working on "biodegradable" plastic, but the term comes with so many asterisks that it's almost meaningless.
In the short term, petroleum based plastics do not biodegrade, they degrade.
"Biodegradable" petroleum plastics just degrade faster.
After that, it's up to the micro-organisms in the environment to break the plastic down.
And if the plastic is in a non-ideal environment, it'll hang around longer.
Land fills are especially bad environments for plastics to degrade in.
/Bioplastics are a while nother story and, while better for the environment, are not a mature technology yet