The technology to make glass or plastic croffles or shade balls is well known although these are not typically reflective. Metal versions such as aluminium might also work. The ability to deliver by ship exists as does regular monitoring of the collection point in the Pacific Ocean. The proposed mirror in the stable “Rubbish Patch” is manageable and poses no added risk to marine life nor to shipping. It can also be monitored by existing satellites. The pilot project is to choose reflective surfaces, to assess survival and to measure the effect. The final mirror will send incoming radiation back out into space.
To be practical, we could release a hundred billion croffles each year.
One hundred billion, Is that possible?
Compare the number of plastic bottles made , and thrown away.
About a trillion plastic bottles ( that is a thousand billion) are made annually.
(600 billion water bottles, 485 billion PET bottles, plus 700 billion glass bottles)
About 350,000 aluminium drinks cans are made every minute in the world. That is nearly 200 billion per year.
So while it is a big ask, it can be done, no new physics is required, and no rockets. The scale is less than current bottle or drinks can manufacture.
How big is a 1% albedo enhancing mirror?
The Earth disc is about 130 million square kilometres.
The ocean average albedo is about 8%, rather dark. Adding reflective croffles will change that to 80%, ten times more.
So, allowing for night and day, the area required is about 260 thousand square kilometres.
( A little larger than Kansas (213000 sq.km.)
A floating mirror about that size can halt or even reverse the global warming effect. It reduces the net energy from the sun. It compensates for the greenhouse effects of CO2 and CH4. This is a genuine Carbon offset project.
Meaning: floating objects, often spheres, but other shapes are interesting. For example: bottles or cans, even inflated, lenticular, metal flying saucer shapes are possible. Balls are used in multitudes for control of evaporation from large areas of water but I propose to make them reflective as a semi permanent floating distributed mirror.
The materials and designs to be tried will include glass, aluminium and plastic such as white or super white polyester. Most metals are highly reflective.
The final size and shape will be chosen to avoid wild animal temptation. The pilot phase is to evaluate the best mirror croffle.
Many countries produce croffles for surface waters control, they reduce evaporation.
The processes required to make them highly reflective already exist. It will not be a technical challenge to produce reflective croffles but the durability in real ocean conditions must be assessed before mass production.