What can you do to get rid of the great pacific garbage patch?

Answer 1

Development of chemical compounds that bond with hydrocarbons is already underway for the purpose of oil spill cleanups. The reality is that heavier hydrocarbon polymers, like packaging plastic, should be easier to bind than liquid hydrocarbons because they are already solid. The only issue is that the smaller micro-plastics float in the water column, making using a chemical solvent almost impossible because of the volume of water that would have to be saturated. However, if this chemical were to simply be bonded to the surface layer of plastic, then the plastic rafts themselves could be sunk by adding weight in the form of heavier-than water compound foam on top of it. These rafts could sink, trapping the micro-plastics in the sticky web of plastic and heavy foam would fall down the water column until it reached the bottom, where divers could attach cables and haul them up to the barges via a crane.