Protei, Oil Spill Collecting Sailing Drones @ TEDxMidAtlantic

A few days ago, I was lucky to be on stage of TEDxMidAtlantic to present Protei, a technology in development I am working on with a bunch of brilliant people (Open_Sailing, randomwalks and V2_ folks). 
Protei would be a Fleet of Oil Spill Collecting Sailing Drones. I just made this 7 minutes video that explains how it would work (also on youtube if you want to share / embed / rate). I am now working on the collaborative website and the documentation to meet Open Hardware standards - long way to go :) The video of the talk may come up sometimes, meanwhile you have my explanation here :) Sorry for my terrible french accent, hehehe

We are currently looking for ways to fund this project, if you have ideas of grants, competitions, Institutions or companies that would be interested in working on this, please comment, thanks ! 

At long last, the Plastiki sets sail (photos)

http://news.cnet.com/2300-11386_3-10002869-15.html?tag=mncol

March 20, 2010 12:18 PM PDT

SAUSALITO, Calif.--At 9:30 a.m. PDT Saturday, precisely on time, the Plastiki, a "boat made of 12,000 plastic bottles" and the brainchild of banking heir David de Rothschild, set sail from a berth here in this town just north of the Golden Gate Bridge.

The Plastiki is not just the world's first boat made buoyant by discarded soda bottles. It's also a statement about the world's garbage problem, and the fact that most plastic bottles are thrown away rather than recycled.

The intent is to sail the boat 11,000 nautical miles from Sausalito to Sydney, Australia. It is carrying about 1,000 liters of water, meaning the crew will have to stop from time to time to resupply. But they have fishing rods onboard, so at least some of their food, in theory, will come from the sea.

Among the inspirations for the project, in addition to bring attention to the way humans are treating our environment, is the Kon-Tiki expedition, Thor Heyerdahl's 1947 trip across the Pacific in a boat that was a reproduction of an Inca raft.

In keeping with tradition, the Plastiki will pay even more homage to Heyerdahl. Among the six crew members is Olav Heyerdahl, Thor's grandson.

Here, the Plastiki is seen as it has just sailed underneath the Golden Gate Bridge and heads for the Pacific. Its journey has just begun.

Photo by Daniel Terdiman/CNET

Canadian teen discovers plastic-bag-devouring microbe

http://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/Bright-Green/2008/0523/canadian-teen-discovers-plastic-bag-devouring-microbe

Very relevant for the treatment of oceanic great plastic gyres.

By Eoin O'Carroll, Blogger for The Christian Science Monitor / May 23, 2008

As part of a science fair project, a Canadian teenager has come up with a way to get plastic shopping bags, which normally take up to 1,000 years to decompose, to break down in as little as three months.

Daniel Burd, a 16-year-old high school student in Waterloo, Canada, reasoned that, because plastic eventually degrades, there is probably some some microorganism out there that breaks it down. If that microbe could be identified, you could expose higher concentrations of it to plastic and break it down faster.

So Mr. Burd did just that. The Waterloo Region Recordexplains his experiment:

First, he ground plastic bags into a powder. Next, he used ordinary household chemicals, yeast and tap water to create a solution that would encourage microbe growth. To that, he added the plastic powder and dirt. Then the solution sat in a shaker at 30 degrees.

After three months of upping the concentration of plastic-eating microbes, Burd filtered out the remaining plastic powder and put his bacterial culture into three flasks with strips of plastic cut from grocery bags. As a control, he also added plastic to flasks containing boiled and therefore dead bacterial culture.

Six weeks later, he weighed the strips of plastic. The control strips were the same. But the ones that had been in the live bacterial culture weighed an average of 17 percent less.

Burd then went on to identify which one of the four bacterial strains in the culture was the one with the appetite for plastic. He identified two: Sphingomonas and Pseudomonas. The first one breaks down the plastic, and the second one helps the first one reproduce.

After some experimentation, he was able to get a plastic bag to degrade by 43 percent in six weeks.

His six-page report, which you can download here (PDF), concludes that the process he developed could be used on an industrial scale.

Plastic bags are usually buried in landfills or thrown into the oceans and surrounding ecosystems. The process of polyethylene degradation developed in this project can be used on an industrial scale for biodegradation of plastic bags. As a result, this would save the lives of millions of wildlife species and save space in landfills.

It's hard to understate the environmental catastrophe caused by plastic bags. Many of them end up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a swatch of trash twice the size of Texas that is estimated to be 80 percent plastic. A report by Greenpeace found that some 267 marine species suffer from either ingesting or getting entangled in the bags.

As far as anyone knows, Burd is the first to discover the plastic-devouring properties of this microbe. For his efforts, Burd won top honors at the Canada-Wide Science Fair in Ottawa, where he took home $30,000 in prizes and scholarships.

Floating water sewage and treatement

http://www.cmdr.ch/ocean98/fwtp.htm

A CLEAR SOLUTION

There is a system that solves a problem of coastal wastewater pollution. It can process municipal sewage from medium to large cities situated in coastal areas where local topography often limits the available sites for land based treatment facilities. In the Czech Republic a floating waste water treatment plant was developed as a cost effective solution for processing municipal sewage from medium to large cities situated in coastal areas where local topography often limits the available sites for land based treatment facilities. It can be hooked to any existing canal system in a matter of days and starting to treat the sewage that otherwise is dumped in the costal waters. It offers the possibility to recycle up to 88% of the treated wastewater and return it to use in the community. In communities facing water shortages, this capability may be a key factor in decision making process.







Read more here.

Toxic Garbage Island documentary

http://www.vbs.tv/watch/toxic/toxic-garbage-island-1-of-3

Via Ollie Palmer, Thanks.



http://www.algalita.org/