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Grown up in on the Caribbean island of Curacao I've been skin and scuba diving and learning how vulnerable coral reefs are. Many miles of shoreline reefs were destroyed by dredging for the big harbor of "Anna baai" but equally destructive were dredging jobs for creating marina's and creating sand beaches from broken limestone dropped from cliffs. Thousands of years of coral growth was killed by a layer of sediment no more then a hair thick but preventing photosynthesis and not enough current and wave motion to remove the layer. These polyps have no way to shed the unnatural sediments. The result is a rock dessert like appearance with little other then algae. A much larger disaster is the plastic soup, a problem that floating plastic particles from discarded single use items stay afloat until they are mistaken for prey /food and eaten by any and all animals that eat at the sea's surface. Most dead animals now found at sea or at the surf are stuffed with plastic particles. They have no natural way of loosing these particles and until they devolve they stay in the stomach and reduce the hunger feeling finally killing the animal by famine. Another effect is that pest control poisons and the deteriorated breakdown agents also synthetic hormones have a high affinity to the surface of these plastics and become 1000 to 1000000 fold more concentrated there. most or all fish that we eat are hunters and have eaten a lot these poisoned smaller animals and have accumulated these poisons in their body fat. even if you don't eat fish your chicken, pig and cow fodder is loaded with fish. So even if you don't care about the oceans the plastic soup problem concerns everyone.
There is a big attempt going on with anchored v shaped nets that concentrate the soup at the tip to load it into a storage. I hope it will work but I doubt it will stay working when a couple of those floating sea containers hit or when whole trees that often fall into the sea get caught by the nets.
I have an alternative idea with free floating rings that are sloped inward and have a fyke net hanging down from the rings. I need to find out how high a certain diameter ring needs to be to interact correctly with waves spaced about two ring diameters. If a wave runs into a slope at the rings outside inward it pushes the ring downward allowing water inside the ring and if it runs further and hits the slope at the opposite side it pushes it upward preventing the water from flushing over it. A cone shaped net with more cone shaped inner nets letting through water and plastic in one direction will prevent most of the collected plastic from flushing out by rough waves. My impression is that some different sizes of these rings will collect with different sizes waves while just floating on to big waves and not being low enough for to small waves. A floating island of interconnected rings could keep floating around until most are nearly full and then detecting the situation the structure could be guided to slowly sail/kite to a collection site at a real nearby island.

My system doesn't suffer the damage problems and anchoring makes them having expensive structural strength and cabling nor does it cost much to start testing. I want to make dovetail connectible blocks that will float 50% so I can test how waves wilt really interact with them. That is my first real aim. I've used Autodesk Inventor 2013 for different smaller projects at work and I think I can do the design of these blocks.

I have a Rostock MAX vsn 2 delivery but I miss melamine board no 1 (but there is an extra no 4 ) so need some time to continue the assembling. This is my first 3D printer and I was immediately mesmerized by the 3 equal axis design but I had to be sure it was going to work. This R Max vsn 2 convinced me.

I am dyslectic so I hope my spelling and English are OK .

Very intersting and worthy project.

I would start with car/truck/motorbuke inner tubes. If you fill them with water with various degrees you can get the float level desired.

Also, if you can do a design that repurposes scrap barrels milk containers etc etc... it would be easier to implement worldwide. Unless you plan to go commercial with this.

Yes, I will for the final version try to get it cheap and easy, but I have too many variables to vary without having to cope with peculiarities of tires and canisters and the like. I think the best shot I have is to make the ring 45 deg sloped inwards and make many bubbles of air in them that their average density is half of the water's so an approaching wave pushes down on the bottom half that is already submerged. On the other side the wave will be pushing up on the inward overhanging slope preventing flushing out the collected stuff.

By seeing how high such a ring has to be so no water flows over the back side but not to high for the waves to climb the front that's first. I will try this with an inflexible ring but later on I could see how to optimize it by making the ring's wall so thin that it can flex and see if it gets even better. For this first project I will make only small rings If this model proves that it can work I'll see around for more practical materials and existing stuff, but I first need to optimize a proof of concept.

To be honest I already made a ring of aluminum sheet with foam floats distributed on the inside fixed with ties, but it was way to unstable. I even tried to make enough pine wood blocks to glue together with flexible power glue, but I couldn't get an accurate enough angle with hand cutting in a miter to make any ring of 45 deg inward tilt. Pine wood has about the correct density and I would have painted it with boat varnish. So now I want to try and build something seriously from well defined parts that I can also present when showing the principal.

so thanks, I'll keep your ideas in mind for later when the real stuff has to be built.