While that’s true it’s also important not to discourage youngsters from having ideas. It’s all too common that us older, perhaps more jaded, folk will lecture others with comments like “ideas are cheap” but those ideas come from people with fresh enthusiasm to solve those problems and sometimes that enthusiasm does translate to execution.

So while I do agree with your point, we should still be encouraging ideas.

Oh I'm all for radical ideas, it's mostly this sort of hollow media coverage that annoys me.

This. It seems to me that every few years there's a new "brilliant" idea by an unlikely "inventor" that promises to solve every pollution problem in the ocean forever. But then it becomes clear that the brilliant idea on paper is impossible in practice, on scale, so it never comes down to anything other than wishful CGI.

The media around the topic is too focused on heroics, as if this is a puzzle with a nifty solution that only someone thinking outside of the box can come up with. Reality is less elegant.

Is it impossible? Or is it because our poor millitary couldn't spare $2Bil to execute on these ideas? Or the global military budget by all countries couldn't spare $20bil to execute?

I think it's very important to distinguish which things are technically not possible, vs we simply chose that our murder machines are more useful in the short term.

The article hints that the filtration process could happen in washing machines, even further upstream (so to speak)

Probably a good idea to filter the "output", but I'd imagine this would be interesting for a lot of people to filter tap water as it comes in as well, combined with whatever other filters you may already have.

When I saw the interceptor it reminded me a lot to this much older project.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkQbcrzyAeE