An automated ship that trolls the plastic gyres and creates buoyant recycled plastic goods for redistribution. Finished products can be stored for eventual offloading during refueling or merely dumped offshore close enough to impoverished island nations that they will wash up on the beach and be utilized.
-- whatrock, Jun 19 2019

Bacteria eating plastic https://www.smithso...-plastic-180968881/
Plastic eating bacteria [unhelpful_fool, Jun 20 2019]

Prior art Ocean-Going Plastic...ed Bussard Ram-Ship
by [bs0]. Another kind of ship that collects and uses plastic from the ocean. [notexactly, Jun 21 2019]

I'd think that trying to recycle the plastic bits would be very difficult since the ship would be collecting a wide variety of plastics that don't play nice together.
-- unhelpful_fool, Jun 19 2019


If the ship had the right sort of apparatus, the plastic could be burned as fuel, thereby saving the oil that would have gone into powering the ship.
-- MaxwellBuchanan, Jun 19 2019


//plastics that don't play nice together.//

At this point, we'd picture ant-like microbots sorting it all into piles.
-- pertinax, Jun 20 2019


[pertinax], we must go smaller! Let the bacteria breakdown the pieces so that they can release the hydrogen for fuel.
-- unhelpful_fool, Jun 20 2019


After calm and peaceful reflection of an area of 1.6 million square kilometers of floating litter, how many nukes would be required to eliminate that? [8th] oughta know to within one or two. The planet could solve this garbage issue fairly quickly I would think.
-- whatrock, Jun 20 2019


//how many nukes would be required to eliminate that?// The smart move would be to wait until the plastic becomes contiguous, and then just set fire to it.
-- MaxwellBuchanan, Jun 20 2019



random, halfbakery