There is a sickening and disgusting thing happening in many of our world's oceans.
Our trash is piling up, often creating garbage islands, and circulating around in circles amongst the natural current.
Since, it keeps going around in circles; it is out of sight and out of mind, well for humans, not such a good deal for sea life.
The problem is there is an abundance of trash out there, and it is seriously getting to be a problem.
When Typhoons come along or big storms it is blown on to the shores in Asia and it is there for all too see, bottles, plastic, wrappers, and well you name it, human trash.
I propose we create even more garbage and throw it into the mix.
WHAT? You ask, well, let me explain and don't get angry this is a good idea.
Right now, the garbage is swirling around, waiting to form into a trash island, just like particles in space become planets.
The Storms sometimes break them apart and the process starts all over again.
Each time more trash is found floating, the problem just keeps getting bigger each year, and decade.
My idea is to create "fake garbage" and use those pieces of trash as floating sensors; some of this garbage is 90-feet below the surface and above.
If you had one piece of "fake trash" every 1-mile and used nodes and motes to connect to an "artificial grid" and added that to the net-centric grid of detection, with one of the pieces of trash closest to the surface using an active matrix RFID communication system, which pinged the satellite as densities increased.
Then we send a ship in to capture the trash as it reaches a density large enough to catch, then we collect it to be recycled.
Meanwhile, we work to find out where the trash is coming from, along river mouths, dumps, and trash ships that dump it.
We must stop this pollution, it's just grotesque in every regard.
Some say this idea is too expensive and the sensors would cost too much, but no one has come up with a method yet of tracking, containing, collecting, and then recycling all this trash.
I believe MIT has used a very simple system we could employ for Lobster tracking to find out if the nitrates from the run-off is causing their shells to decay and become brittle in Maine and Mass.
If we use their technology the price for the sensors would be cheap.
The sensors could be made cheap, ($3 for the nodes and motes plus the pop bottle, which I could drink first and then re-cap? ha ha ha) and the expensive piece would be the $150 satellite relay pingers and chip for the data, solar powered, or use a satellite phone, use Chinese technology, it's cheap, re-program it for our usage).
The satellite pingers could be simple, and I do recall they had some technology like this for cargo container tracking to determine if a radioactive device was on a cargo ship ran off solar, I think was the system.
Not sure if that scheme or technology made it through DHS budget.
Nevertheless, all the technology exists and it will help us clean it all up.
We need to simultaneously stop the polluting countries and pick up what's there.
Please consider all this.