Earlier quoted context omitted.
The initial cost of 25K gliders would be 7.5 Billion dollars, and unfortunately, most of the plastic in the gyre isn't of a size you could pick up with anything more porous than a coffee filter. 25K gliders pulling nets would be amusing, but that's a lot of money for a partial solution!
Expensive yes, although I have it on good authority that I could get a discount on that quantity :-) Also in discussing this briefly with some folks the entrapment systems would be more complex than nets or coffee filters. But lets say your investment was, all in $10B over 10 years and you remediated 60 - 70% of the problem. Would that be, in your opinion, a waste of money? Understand the alternative is to live with…
It definitely merits study, but I imagine the best ideas are going to be in plastic-digesting microbes, and measures to reduce the amount of new plastic that gets into the system. I'm afraid we're going to have a layer of microscopic plastic sediment on our crust, just as we have a layer of radioactive soil from atomic testing in the 50s and 60s. It will be one of the geological landmarks of our era.