boon·dog·gle
/ˈbo͞onˌdäɡəl/

noun:  work or activity that is wasteful or pointless but gives the appearance of having value.

verb: waste money or time on unnecessary or questionable projects.

The end of 2018 was tough for the Ocean Cleanup and its founder, inventor, and CEO Boyan Slat.   In September, the 2000 foot-boom and supposed plastic collection device, was first deployed about 240 nautical miles offshore of San Francisco where it was tested for two weeks.  The boom was then towed an additional 1,400 miles off the West Coast, about halfway between California and Hawaii, to begin collecting plastic in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.  This was supposed to be the first real-world proof of concept and trials of the device in the Pacific Garbage Patch.

Note that the previous prototype in the North Sea also failed at a shallower depth in calm seas. Of course, the next step is to build a bigger one and place it in rougher and deeper seas.

But in November, Ocean Cleanup stated the system was not holding plastic it collected.  This lack of plastic collection arose from the system moving too slowly at times to hold plastic within the U-shaped collection area.  The system is supposed to work by currents pushing plastics into the booms and nets.  Yet slow and complex currents in this region of the Pacific allowed plastics to float out of the device again.

In late December, 60-feet of boom had detached due to material fatigue.  Slat then indicated that this likely occurred due to wave action placing stress on the boom. The fracture was caused by material fatigue, he wrote. That’s likely because of the intense action of the waves that puts tremendous stress on objects in the water.

So to recap, the Ocean Cleanup system cannot either collect plastic or withstand the Pacific Ocean.

 In a September interview with NPR, he said the device averages about four inches per second, which his team has now concluded is too slow. The break in the barrier was due to an issue with the material used to build it.

However, both of these issues could have easily been avoided by more appropriate simulations, analyses, and information prior to construction and deployment.

When the material failure occurred, it wasn’t due to the result of a major Pacific storm. It was just normal wear and tear, Slat said

Understanding material stresses is a key component of an engineering project and one that is well understood before construction.   Note as well that the system is not something actually new, but is a modification of RO-BOOMS used in oil spill clean up since 1988.  I am confident the specifications for use and the ocean states the booms can operate in are well known by the manufacturer and previous users alike. [UPDATE: The booms used ar eno longer the RO-BOOMS.  It is a completely different design, a recent internal iteration which may explain the failure.]

And while currents are complex, a whole field of physical oceanography exists and provides readily the information to know the current regime in the area.  If more detailed temporal or spatial resolution is needed, the Ocean Cleanup team should have conducted more field studies to gain the data on the currents beforehand.    The Ocean Cleanup has always seemed poorly developed and executed, ignorant of the best science and data available, blatantly dismissive of critique, and far too hurried.

This rush to place the device in the ocean for both good publicity and for the feeling of accomplishing something is unproductive at best and dangerous at the worst.  And it clear that Slat is committed to an overly ambitious timeline no matter the consequences.

Founder & CEO Boyan Slat announced the news in a December 31 blog post, saying “setbacks like this are inevitable when pioneering new technology at a rapid pace”, and maintaining that ” these teething troubles are solvable, and the cleanup of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch will be operational in 2019″.
Read more at http://www.mysailing.com.au/latest/ocean-cleanup-s-20-million-plastic-catcher-breaks#1R7mecWOPU9tLbJl.99

I get no pleasure in saying I told you so but…

As noted in a recent article featuring Dr. Goldstein,

But a critic who has followed Slat’s project since he unveiled it more than five years ago said the failure was predictable and that systems deployed closer to shore stand a greater chance of slowing the deluge of plastics spilling into the world’s oceans.

“I certainly hope they will be able to get it to work, but this is a very difficult environment where equipment breaks, which is why you normally do things closer to shore, where things are easier to repair,” said [Dr.] Miriam Goldstein, director of ocean policy at the Center for American Progress

In 2014, Drs. Kim Martini and Drs. Miriam Goldstein, a physical and biological oceanographer, provided a detailed technical review of the feasibility study here at DSN. Note the two of them pointed nearly 4 years ago about these issues.

….The modeling studies severely underestimate potential loads and tensions on the moored array and boom. Therefore, they are insufficient to properly design a mooring concept and estimate potential costs…

Since the authors had access to ORCAFLEX, a professional software package to design offshore marine structures, a full-scale mooring array could have been modeled to estimate loads and tensions on the moored array, but was not.

Structural deformation of the array and loss of functionality by ocean currents are not addressed…

Yeah. So these exact failures were predicted four years ago.

As this article clearly lays out, we should focus our funding and time, on more promising solutions to the ocean trash problem.

The post The Continued Boondoggle of the Ocean Cleanup first appeared on Deep Sea News.

They deployed a 100-m long prototype

that is really 30-year old RO-BOOM technology

with some new fancy hardware.

Deployed in only 30 m of water

during a calm summer

the prototype failed after 2 months.

Because shackles.

It cost $2 million euros

and collected ZERO pieces of plastic.

If you, like me, are concerned about plastic in the ocean consider helping groups like The Ocean Conservancy who collected more than 18 million pounds of trash during the 2015 Coastal Ocean Cleanup or Mr. Trash Wheel and Professor Trash Wheel who has collected 1,050,540 lbs. of trash from Baltimore’s Inner Harbor since May 9, 2014. The problem of ocean plastic isn’t solved yet.

The post What did the Boyan Slat and the Ocean Cleanup do last summer? first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Why are they using RO-BOOM oil booms?

Andrew Thaler over at Southern Fried Science pointed this out. RO-BOOMS are commercially available oil containment spill booms that have been around at least since 1988. I would assume that something is known about their durability?

Yup, definitely a RO-BOOM.

Excuse my language, BUT WHY THE F** ARE THEY BLACK?

You just spent all this money to add a custom paint job to a floating advertisement potential maritime hazard and it’s one of the least visible colors at sea. I CAN’T EVEN.

Where are the booms?

There’s gotta be a notice to mariner’s out there somewhere. In case you don’t know what this is, it’s a public announcement that you have to put out when ever you deploy anything at sea. So people don’t run over it or anything cause it’s camouflaged.

Are these the booms the 1 km deployment planned for Japan will use?

ARE THEY? I NEEDS TO KNOW. They look a lot different from the booms that were tested at the Marin Facility. 

which also seems to be different than what was tested at the Deltares facility.

Do the maybe intended booms actually collect plastic?

No seriously, there seems to have been a lot of effort to test the structural stability, but no testing whether they actually collect plastic and debris. I would have liked to see them drag the barrier around a bit just to see before deploying a big and expensive mooring if it is indeed the one they are going to use. As the Feasibility study indicated, sometimes the barriers can’t collect plastic so it would be useful to know when this is.

How did they get funding EUR 0.5 Million from the Dutch Government?

Is there a public proposal? It would be great to see, especially since this is now a publicly funded project and it would be great resource for reporters interested in the project (instead of them asking Miriam and I to constantly peer review it…grumble grumble).

That’s all I got for now. Any more questions you can ask Andrew Thaler at Southern Fried Science who also has questions.

The post The Ocean Cleanup deployed a prototype and I honestly have A LOT of questions first appeared on Deep Sea News.