It should be possible to design floating trash collecting buoys in swimming areas that would gather trash due to wave action, no power or active mechanisms needed.
Perhaps someone would go by and empty them every morning.
Hotels and resorts on beaches would love to have something like this.
The tiny Wave Gliders are quite useful. They're small, smaller than a surfboard. They're considered "marine debris" for vessel safety purposes. Electronics is so small today that they carry compute power, GPS, cameras, and Iridium for communications, plus other small oceanographic instruments as desired. They're tough enough to survive hurricanes. The control center has AIS info and steers them away from vessel traffic. Propulsion is mostly passive, using wave action to propel the glider forward. They're slow, but make steady progress.
You wouldn't necessarily need to even drop much more than a mass that weighs more than twice the buoyant force of the buoy with a block to redirect the cable, then have a floating platform that's more buoyant than the sinking buoy.
Surely the same technology being used in the Ocean Cleanup Machine would work. That is, it's not a net. Also boats could drive around it, it just needs to be in the flow of the river.
Dumb question I'm sure has been asked... we've been throwing stuff into the sea for awhile then going and picking it up later as it's bobbing gently in the waves. Why not just have some inflatable buoys that deploy in the water and have it float? Catching it seems pretty difficult, albeit pretty sweet.
That's what they already do. It's a steerable parafoil. How would they be expected to get the ship lined up underneath the parafoil in time to catch it otherwise?
interesting idea - and very much in the spirit of the project.
It's a pretty closed off harbour so there aren't really any waves, and there's almost no tide so not much flow past the raft either. Especially since it's moored in a sidechannel. So it probably won't work :-(
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