Ocean Garbage: The next big fuel source?

by Emily Gertz

categories: Clean Energy, Greenhouse Gas, Jobs & Economy, Oceans, Wildlife & Biodiversity

Published June 10, 2009 @ 05:38AM PT

Seen in the comments on Haute*Nature:

Develop a ship to harvest the trash and process it into fuel to run the ship. Plastics can be a good fuel source. This may not be a perfect solution but it’s better than doing nothing.

What's this about? Generally, it's about the astonishingly enormous flotilla of plastic trash floating on the surface of the ocean, such as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Some debris ends up in the ocean after being dumped overboard (or off land) intentionally. Trash is carried into the ocean by stormwater runoff and wind, or flows out with the tide from littered beaches.

Specifically, it's about how this marine debris has complicated the search for the remains of Air France 447, the passenger jet that crashed into the ocean near Brazil last week. Navel crew from at least three nations are working hard now to find the wreckage, and recover the bodies of the victims (which would be some solace, however small, for their survivors). But the "massive amount of garbage in the ocean" is making this open-ocean search even harder.

Could turning this trash into an energy resource make cleaning the garbage off the ocean more of a priority?

First, the recovery effort. CNN reported last week that trash on the ocean's surface was hampering the search for the jet's remains:

Earlier [last] week, investigators said they had located pieces of the plane in the southern Atlantic Ocean, which might have given them clues to the origin of Air France Flight 447's crash.

But on Thursday, Brazilian officials said what they had found was nothing more than run-of-the-mill ocean trash.

This highlights a little-seen environmental problem: Scientists say the world's oceans are increasingly filled with junk -- everything from large items like refrigerators and abandoned yachts to small stuff like plastic bottles.

Much of the ocean trash is plastic, which means it won't go away for hundreds of years, if ever. And the problem has gotten so bad that soupy "garbage patches" have developed in several locations, called gyres, where ocean currents swirl...

"That area [of the crash site] has got lots of debris that's just out there, coming from Europe heading over the Americas," said Curtis Ebbesmeyer, a oceanographer and author of a book called "Flatsometrics and the Floating World." "And it's notoriously difficult to spot debris from the air."

Obviously, if this debris was perceived as a valuable resource, particularly in an increasingly energy-starved world, people and governments could become motivated to keep it out of the ocean in the first. place. It might become cost-effective to "harvest" the floating garbage off the ocean's surface, as well.

How feasible is it to reprocess marine debris into fuel?

As it turns out, very feasible. In fact, it's already being done:

In Hawai'i, The Honolulu Derelict Net Recycling Program collects abandoned marine fishing nets, chops them up, and then uses the crud to power a waste-to-energy facility, Hpower, operated by Covanta Energy.
A report from KHNL-Channel 8 Honolulu states that 34 tons of abandoned or turned-in fishing nets (and a little line) have been transformed into electricity.

Using waste for fuel is a win for the community: Hpower employs 150 people, has a $10 million payroll, and spends $6.5 million annually in the local community on goods and services. And it's a win for communities worldwide: Covanta estimates that turning one ton of waste into energy offsets over a ton of greenhouse gas pollution.

Another program, Fishing for Energy, collects worn-out or derelict gear from fishers, such as rope, crab pots, netting, and gear rigging. The metals are sorts out for recycling, and the rest chopped up for use as fuel in a Covanta waste-to-energy plant. Participating ports in 2008 collected over 123 tons (247,000 lbs) of gear, which would otherwise have ended up in landfills, or simply abandoned at sea or on land.

Now, there are an estimated four million tons of garbage floating on the ocean. (The well-publicized Pacific Garbage Patch is estimated to be 5 million square miles wide.) Project Kaisei suggests that harvesting this trash can provide employment to fishing boat owners and crew who've lost their work to increasingly mechanized fishing and collapsing fish populations:

Many fishermen have lost their jobs as relentless, high-tech fishing methods have depleted fish stocks leaving little hope of survival. We meet the men whose boats have been decommissioned as the pressure to produce more and more fish each day has been too great. Now these fishermen have the chance to give something back to the ocean and we watch their boats being transformed into specialized plastic-consuming machines to collect the waste and turn it in to fuel. If successful, the vessels will be fuelled entirely by the waste they collect and they will become part of a team undertaking the biggest clean up the Earth has ever witnessed.

Cleaning up ocean trash would have another major payoff, because it is a terrible threat to wildlife, injuring and killing unknowable numbers of animals every year. "Sea turtles, for instance, mistake plastic bags and balloons for jellyfish (a favorite food) and die when the plastic chokes them or clogs their digestive systems," according to Ocean Conservancy. "In addition, trash in the ocean poses the serious threat of entanglement...When animals [such as turtles, seals and dolphins] get caught in abandoned fishing nets, lines, and ropes floating in the water a phenomenon known as "ghost fishing" - they may drown immediately or drag the debris around until they weaken and die. Abandoned nets drifting underwater can also snag on corals, sponges, and sea fans, damaging and even dislodging them."

Marine debris: From economic bane, navigation hazard and killer of wildlife, to employment-creating, economy-driving clean energy source? Not bad at all, if we can pull it off.