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by wazoox 1933 days ago
The Ocean Cleanup project started somewhat like this. They made prototypes and extensive testing, and concluded honestly that cleaning the ocean isn't doable, so they turned to cleaning up the source of most oceanic plastic: rivers. Their river cleaning boat is completely different from their initial idea, but it works well.

Ideas are cheap; execution is hard...
4 comments
laumars 1933 days ago
While that’s true it’s also important not to discourage youngsters from having ideas. It’s all too common that us older, perhaps more jaded, folk will lecture others with comments like “ideas are cheap” but those ideas come from people with fresh enthusiasm to solve those problems and sometimes that enthusiasm does translate to execution.

So while I do agree with your point, we should still be encouraging ideas.

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wazoox 1933 days ago
Oh I'm all for radical ideas, it's mostly this sort of hollow media coverage that annoys me.
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whatever_dude 1933 days ago
This. It seems to me that every few years there's a new "brilliant" idea by an unlikely "inventor" that promises to solve every pollution problem in the ocean forever. But then it becomes clear that the brilliant idea on paper is impossible in practice, on scale, so it never comes down to anything other than wishful CGI.

The media around the topic is too focused on heroics, as if this is a puzzle with a nifty solution that only someone thinking outside of the box can come up with. Reality is less elegant.

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nelsonenzo 1933 days ago
Is it impossible? Or is it because our poor millitary couldn't spare $2Bil to execute on these ideas? Or the global military budget by all countries couldn't spare $20bil to execute?

I think it's very important to distinguish which things are technically not possible, vs we simply chose that our murder machines are more useful in the short term.

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h0l0cube 1933 days ago
The article hints that the filtration process could happen in washing machines, even further upstream (so to speak)
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hnarn 1933 days ago
Probably a good idea to filter the "output", but I'd imagine this would be interesting for a lot of people to filter tap water as it comes in as well, combined with whatever other filters you may already have.
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kippel 1933 days ago
When I saw the interceptor it reminded me a lot to this much older project.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkQbcrzyAeE

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