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Pacific Trash Vortex To Become Habitable Island?
thefickler writes "The Pacific Ocean trash dump is twice the size of Texas, or the size of Spain combined with France. The Pacific Vortex, as it is sometimes called, is made up of four million tons of plastic. Now, there's a proposal to turn this dump into 'Recycled Island.' The Netherlands Architecture Fund has provided the grant money for the project, and the WHIM architecture firm is conducting the research and design of Recycled Island. One of the three major aims of the project is to clean up the floating trash by recycling it on site. Two, the project would create new land for sustainable habitation complete with its own food sources and energy sources. Lastly, Recycled Island is to be a seaworthy island. While at the moment the project is still more or less a pipe dream, it's great that someone is trying to work out what to do with one of humanity's most bizarre environmental slip-ups."
If they're going to recycle the plastics right there on the island made of the plastics - the island will gradually be turned into whatever they're recycling the plastic into. This isn't a viable project - it's just a promotional piece intended to raise awareness. No real scientist would ever propose such a lunatic scheme.
Noodle will surely shoot down any initial surveyors on suspicion of them being pirates, and i don't even want to know what Murdoc would do to trespassers.
Seems more sensible to make it all heavier than water and sink it. Once it's on the bottom natural sedimentation processes will bury it for good.
We already have that. It's call Los Angeles.
8m2 per km2
The greatest problem with the gyre is that the plastic in question is untold quadrillions of tiny, sometimes microscopic, bits of plastic that have broken down under UV light and descended somewhere in the water column. You would need to filter several meters deep to filter all the garbage out.
Of course, bean counters will kill this because it's unprofitable, and everyone else will ignore it because it's so far out to sea.
The first story I read about the patch made it sound like it was bordering on becoming an island on its own... an area the size of texas made of milk bottles and grocery bags, all rustling against each other in the waves. No other article I've seen has been that bad, but all of them making it sound much worse than it actually is.
I'm certainly not going to defend a vast region of polluted ocean and poisonous chemicals, but here's what Wikipedia has to say:
"the patch is not visible from satellite photography since it primarily consists of suspended particulates in the upper water column. Since plastics break down to ever smaller polymers, concentrations of submerged particles are not visible from space, nor do they appear as a continuous debris field. Instead, the patch is defined as an area in which the mass of plastic debris in the upper water column is significantly higher than average."
Moore's claim of having discovered a large, visible debris field is, however, a mischaracterization of the polluted region overall, since it primarily consists of particles that are generally invisible to the naked eye."
"A similar patch of floating plastic debris is found in the Atlantic Ocean."
It really doesnt sound terribly island-able. I'm sure you can scoop up enough solid material to build something, but you may have to drag a net for a couple of thousand zig-zagging miles to do it.
If they could slice it up like one of those "all edge pieces" brownie pans, everyone would get beachfront property!!
(1) Build a ****-load of WALL-E robots.
(2) Use them to fill the ocean with trash.
(3) Sell the land.
(4) ???
(5) Profit!
What an euphemism!
This is not something that just happened one day because someone made a mistake. It's the result of decades of carelessness and ignorance.
We can be only happy that the stuff accumulates all in one place so we have at least the hint of a chance to fix it.
Try to do that with the space debris!
no sig
I have heard of this huge mass in the Pacific Ocean for quite some time now. But I never seem to be able to find actual pictures or satellite images of this "Double the size of Texas" island. The only images I ever see are ones that show land mass on the horizon. Which means images that are NOT in the middle of the pacific Ocean. Won't someone help a skeptic out?
Rishi Sowa is gonna be so jealous...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
The reason people raise the alarm about this is not because they want to solve the problem via engineering. They bring this up because it gives them an excuse to bitch about consumer culture, and another sensationalist argument for people in the west to adopt their joyless granola-eating, back-to-the-earth ways.
When Chrissie Hynde wrote about putting up parking lots and breaking up concrete, do you suppose she had PLASTIC parking lots in mind?
It's a Casio on a Plastic Beach
It's a Casio on a Plastic Beach
It's a Styrofoam deep sea landfill
It's a Styrofoam deep sea landfill
It's sort of made a computer speech
It's sort of made a computer speech
It's a Casio on a Plastic Beach
It's a Casio
This has to be the stupidest story I've ever seen submitted on /.
Welcome to the Plastic Beach
I heard that the City of Atlanta is looking to Move offshore to become a tourist spot, and an even greater Delta Hub. This could be the push Atlanta is looking for. ...Except it would be in the Pacific
This all sounds like a great idea, but from what I've gathered, the mass isn't really solid enough to make anything out of it. The logical conclusion is that we need more plastic.
As a general rule, I have tended to throw my plastic into landfills. I figure that, if time lasts long enough, someday they may provide us with (potentially kid-friendly and bouncy) mountains. However, seeing that science has granted us this new frontier, I suppose that I should be throwing my plastic out to sea.
There are 10 commandments: 01)Thou shalt love the Lord Thy God 10)Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.Matt22:34-40
Or how about 1/7th the size of Brazil! Or maybe the size of 5 Ecuadors! Or the size of 1 1/10 Chads! This is fun! Who's got one?
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
Stupid... but cool as hell. There is such a fine line between stupid and clever.
... to where this supposed "dump" was located, and only found small pieces of broken-down plastics, and no massive dump like the article indicates? Seems there was a documentary done about this "dump" being an exaggeration, and over-hyped in the news.
i have some beachfront properties on the rings of saturn i'd like to sell you.
You honestly believe that they will not gather more than they convert?
Slashdot, where armchair scientists get shouted down and armchair theologians get modded up.
They have a Guatemala Sink hole that needs to be filled with stuff. There is stuff.
What is so bizarre? We manufacture plastic, make products out of it and carelessly throw the used products into the ocean where they disintegrate into little bits that accumulate over time. Sad and disgusting, but not bizarre.
And don't get me started on "slip up"...
while [ 1 ]; do echo -n -e "\xe2\x95\xb$((($RANDOM&1)+1))"; done
No fresh water, no agriculture, no habitation.
Most of the flotsam there consists of small particles that are distributed in the first 10m of the water column. What would need to be done is to filter it out and bind it similar to how pebbles are bound with cement to create concrete to create large enough bits that can be combined into an island.
Eventually we (the world community) will have to clear this patch as the plastics now enter the food chain and threaten to poison us all. Already there are areas in the ocean where plastic is more prevalent than krill and plastic is being ingested by marine animals, accumulating in higher organisms and ultimately in us too.
Collecting plastic there would be a nice occupation for all those fishermen that have been made redundant due to overfishing and the necessities to conserve fish stocks. Get them to fish plastic instead and pay them for the trash catch they return.
Two articles on that matter, a bit lengthy but worth your time:
http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/270
http://www.mindfully.org/Plastic/Ocean/Moore-Trashed-PacificNov03.htm
Under whose sovereignity is the new island going to be under? Do we really want the Netherlands to have it?
Anyone else though about how rich the Dutch are going to be if global warming keeps up and Greenland thaws out?
Maybe it's just me but these questions seem more important!
I wonder if we'll find murdoc living there with noodle and the rest of the gang
Maybe I'm old (I do have a birthday coming up this weekend), but: Back from when I was a kid, I remember a few things about the environment:
1. First, at a young age, it was totally appropriate to throw garbage out of the car window.
2. It then became less appropriate as volunteers started making a lot of press about cleaning up litter on roadways, which (presumably) had previously been left to be mowed into tiny pieces and otherwise never degraded (plastics last forever, don't you know?).
3. Six-packs of cans were still common back then. Pictures of fish and animals stuck inside of six-pack plastic rings became common in print media and textbooks, along with captions about how plastics last forever and will soon ruin everything.
4. Sometime around this point, McDonald's decides, "for the environment," to stop packaging their sandwiches in polystyrene containers. (I suspect it had more to do with their trash bill, since the replacement paper-based packaging compressed far more easily, but I digress.)
5. Six-pack plastic universally turns UV-degradable. Other single-use plastics soon followed. Disposable glass bottles disappeared. Pull-tab cans disappeared.
6. Earth Day came back from hiatus.
7. Folks stopped littering, for the most part, which was plainly evident from the relative lack of trash stuck to fences along the side of the road compared to a few years prior.
8. ??? (there's a gap in my memory about environmentalist plastic concerns which lasts for a decade or so, until:)
9. In 2010, degraded plastics (see part 5) are bad, because fish eat them.
So. I'd like to ask anyone with an answer to put forward, simply:
Assume that we use plastic, and that some small percentage (no matter how much overall mass that is) will end up somewhere dangerous. Which is best/least bad: Plastics that don't degrade, or plastics that do degrade?
I don't think we get to have both.
Kid-proof tablet..
Down to more tangible scale, it is roughly 3 grams per square meter. A typical cube of sugar is roughly 4 grams. Now consider that's just surface area, not volume. You're not going to be able to see much of it even if you're swimming in it.
They are saying that there are 4 million tons of plastic out there, and they want to build a 10,000 square km island.
Assume a basic building unit of a plastic floating barrel and a square plastic platform to sit on top of it. Assume that 40kg of plastic are used in the barrel/platform and it will provide all of the necessary flotation for a square meter chunk of island.
In the above scenario, 4 million tons of plastic gets you one hundred million barrel/platform units, and therefore a surface area of one hundred million square meters. That means an island that is TEN square km. Not really enough land to make self sufficient home complete with farmland for half a million people.
What are they going to build the other 9,990 square km of floating island out of?
And as you tread the halls of sanity, You feel so glad to be, Unable to go beyond. I have a message, From another time..
Assuming they could do everything the article says, which in itself is very unlikely... Where are they going to get the fresh water from that we need to survive?
4 million tons is only around 11 Empire State Buildings.
Great, an island of plastic =( Keep on drinking your Coke, smart guys..
Of course that is only surface area... how deep is it?
That's the thing. There is no surface area, it's all particles submerged.
You just calculated the whole of it (by weight).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I heard it described that way.... You wouldn't necessarily see it by flying overhead, but if you were in the "soup" apparently, you would have very small plastic particles all around you - I forget how deep - maybe 5 feet or so? I can't recall correctly.
You won't really see a picture because only the water in a glass jar would then look "funky." I believe the article I read about it did have samples of different parts of the "island" and you could definitely see the little particles... So like I said - think of it as a soup. No - you won't be walking on it, but yeah... you could eat it, and last I checked, it wouldn't be all that great for you.
^^Read That^^ While reading TFS I was itching to say that amidst the laughing I did after reading the acronym "WHIM" and hitting what some people would call crucial points of this whim of insanity.
The game.
More and more frequently, the news reads like segments from a Neil Stephenson novel. One of his earlier ones.
-FL
Probably just vapourware but someone came up with a way to turn plastic back into oil... is that viable for this mess?
Are we worse or better off having that amount of carbon in the ocean as plastic vs in the air as CO2?
I don't really understand your reasoning. The patch wouldn't be as bad if it were actual plastic things that one could somehow remove. The fact that the plastic has broken down into small particles is worse than what most people seem to imagine; the way it is now, it can enter into the food chain, and there is no reasonable way to remove it. Your logic seems to be "Wikipedia says it's invisible, so it can't be too bad." How does it being invisible make it any better?
So the stories don't make it sound worse than it is; they make it sound better than it actually is!
I know they say they'll be making an island, but that could just be the cover story. If they turn it all into fibreglass/plastic boats, pretty soon they'll have a fleet of little yachts large enough to conquer the seven seas. It's quite insidious, if you stop to think about it.
Really though, I'm sure a bunch of Dutch Architects would never do such a thing. Or would they?! Dun dun dunnnnn...
4,000,000,000 kg / 10,000,000,000 m^2 = 0.4 kg/m^2
Anyone else have a problem with this?
WTF?!! That's impressive! How about recycling all of that plastic?
If Texas = size of The Pacific Ocean trash dump and The Pacific Ocean trash dump = size of Spain + France, then Texas = size of Spain + France.
Who knew?
Science-fiction novel distress, written by Greg Egan in 1995, features such an artificial island.
It is populated by climate refugees, and as they are not bound to any government they allow themselves to infringe biotechnology patents they need to survive in this environment.
There has to be a cash value for waste plastic. It is hard to understand why this plastic can not be scooped up and either turned into new plastic items or turned into fuel.
I do notice that recycled plastic lumber is too expensive for most people yet railroad ties are now being made of recycled plastic so it must be possible to deliver plastic boards into the hands of home owners at a reasonable price. That plastic lumbar looks great and handles easily and will last far longer than wood ever would.
I've noticed that if you throw something into a water body, like a lake or an ocean, that the next day you come back and it's gone. So somehow it takes it away and filters it through and it just cleans it up like a garbage compactor or whatever, so it's not really littering if you ask me.
- Ricky, Trailer Park Boys
Murphey's fighting Occam, and we're in the stands.
This looks like a good opportunity to create Utopia.
Say out loud: I'm an Aspie and I'm somewhat proud, I guess. Uh. Can I write an email in all caps instead? Hm...
Just like the floating junk armada in Neal Stephensons Snowcrash novel isn't it?
Absolute best fiction book I've ever read.
cf. Gorillaz' Plastic Beach
Under whose sovereignity is the new island going to be under? Do we really want the Netherlands to have it?
Anyone else though about how rich the Dutch are going to be if global warming keeps up and Greenland thaws out?
Rich? If Greenland thaws out, we're going to need a new place to live. So yeah, why not let us have that floating island in the Pacific that we're going to make?
Atlantis. Wonder why the first one sunk.
If this was a real project (which it isn't) with real funding and serious intentions, this could be a very cool engineering feat. If you base the assembly process on solar-powered automated collectors and separators, a 3D printer-like unit could be used to create any object shape the island needs for construction. However, anyone planning such an undertaking would have to take two big problems into account: toxic chemicals present in the recycled and susceptibility of the island in the face of frequent thunderstorms. Both of which could be tackled by careful engineering, but it won't be easy.
But hey, living on an awesome sci-fi plastic flotilla/arcology? Sign me up!
I seem to recall an inhabited island of garbage in Snow Crash. Or was it the Scar? I think they both had something along those lines...
Why not create gifts, little one-use-items, little statues whatever which can be used as cheap but nice-to-have gadget?
Tourists love to get local items; do something with the waste which has been created.
is it that expensive to reprocess plastic?
Same with electronics; some components are used in multiple versions/editions of a product; returning some of these to sender would be good for both parties; the consumer and producent.
Some companies really are crazy with their packaging; a big box for a small item, needing more transport because of the oversize.
More packaging means more waste in the end.
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
Mark Twain was wrong! (http://thinkexist.com/quotation/buy_land-they-re_not_making_it/173450.html)
In cookery, you use egg whites to bind the debris in a bouillon so you can easily clear it out afterwards. Maybe some form of salt-activated, slow-setting polymer could be used to bind the trash into an island ?
What a depressingly stupid machine.
The so-called island is below the surface of the water.
It is far from being a solid mass.
That any of you actually believes this might be any sort of practical idea
proves P.T. Barnum was right when he said : "There's a sucker born every minute".
I applaud the effort, but allow me to put on my "old man pants" for a second.
Doesn't this just silently legitimize our "use once, throw away" culture? Isn't that the real problem here? Will it have to be a congealed, floating mass of intact plastic containers before the majority of humans can come to a concensus that we can't sustainably keep going on with "business as usual?"
Look, I'll be the first guy in line to extol the virtues of convenience. It feels great. It fits neatly into our "rush to get things done, don't think" lifestyle. But I think we're reaching a tipping point where we can't just shrug stuff like this off.
Seems like a good place to build a permanent floating trash recycling facility since so much of the Pacific trash collects there on its own.
Dewey, you fool! Your decimal system has played right into my hands!
Done right I think this could actually work. Assuming the worst case senario that there is no efficient mechanical means of extracting the plastic from the seawater the island itself would become the separator. Imagine a moderate sized shipping barge with all of the plastic manufacturing and storage equipment with some initial "separators", large plastic boxes, say 8 X 8 X 2 Meters in dimensions with a foot or two deep depression in their tops, all bolted together and bolted to the barge. The depression is filled with a bit of water, the water is allowed to evaporate in the sun leaving the plastic (and salt) which is vacuumed up. It's kind of like thermal desalinization, only water is the unwanted material. As the "island" becomes bigger its separation capabilities increase. As the island begins to form the "sustainable" portions can be added and larger separators can be made. Of course this is the simplest form of the concept, you could come up with some real interesting ideas if you had enough time. The one real issue I see is salt contamination of the plastic, I have no clue as to how easy/difficult it would be to remove the salt from the plastic, or integrate it into the plastic. Anyone?
Murdoc has already done this. It's called "Plastic Beach". He's written a whole damn album about it and been living there for some time now. http://gorillaz.com/ http://gorillaz.com/g-player/audio/plastic-beach
No actual pictures, they won't tell people where it is with any accurate detail, their methods for determining how much are just plain bad science.
Maybe my google-fu is weak sauce today, but I can find in legitimate source documenting this in any reasonable way.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
From the Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_Garbage_Patch. "The patch is not a visibly dense field of floating debris". Since it is not visible it will likely be very difficult to collect or concentrate. I think there will be many technological challenges which may make the bean counters correct on this. It is a shame nonetheless. Julian
I go out of my way to complicate the simple things, so that I can simplify the complicated things.
We need to find some way to get the particles to start sticking together?
It ends badly. Everybody's starving. Inbreeding has become a problem, and then Dennis Hopper shows up and things really go downhill.
Build an island out of plastic which degrades into microscopic particles of plastic, and you'll have an island which turns into microscopic particles of plastic. At least they'll always have work to do.
So if this thing is so huge, why can't i find any pictures of it? I'd love for someone to point out a satellite image of this thing. Does it really exist or is like global warming - something scientists dreamed up to justify their jobs. (I actually believe in global worming, but where are the pictures of this trash vortex?)
Will the inhabitants of the island be dubbed 'Junkions'?
Remember that your barrel is built of plastic which breaks down in seawater and sunlight. You'll have to keep replacing barrels.
I love the picture they've used in the "food cycle" picture. She really looks happy to be contributing to the compost recycling program.
Just stop the ocean currents and the tiny particles will disperse by themselves.
At least the Pacific version of Coney Island Whitefish have something to eat.
I keep seeing articles on this thing, and that it's in the Pacific somewhere, but does anyone know the lat and long of where this thing is?
Is it in international water?
Although people picture this as a gigantic, compact floating mass of plastic, it isn't. It's mostly tiny particles floating in the water, with one a small fraction of the junk floating on top. From Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_Garbage_Patch
Sorry, but recycling plastic just doesn't get easier by throwing it into the ocean and having it swirl around for a while, sadly it gets harder.
"Let me know when you figure out a method to glue 1 trillion individual molecules to pieces of rocks." Surely if they're that small, grains of sand would suffice?
From the summary: "...one of humanity's most bizarre environmental slip-ups".
And by humanity, you mean Americans right? (and perhaps Canadians)
This is a terrible idea even though it gets suggested all the time. The cost of gathering plastic from the trash vortex in the ocean - a very expensive environment to operate in - is literally orders of magnitude higher than gathering plastic by buying and digging up a landfill. I haven't heard about anyone flipping landfills for a 10,000% return, which is what it would take to indicate that it's worth getting plastic out of the Vortex. You are going to spend at least $100, maybe as much as $1000, to get every $1 of plastic out. There are much funner ways to waste money - drugs and hookers, for example.
It starred Kevin Costner, and has jet skies that can hide underwater, and some kid with a tattoo on her back that shows the way to dry land. Now, what was it called? Crapland? Mad Max on water? Whining world? ummm....
Love the idea, but as others have said above, the plastic needs sorting from the plankton at a microscopic level or we're just going to be hoovering up the ocean. I hope they can pull this off (without tattooing some kids back either).
Why is Texas used as measurement? Do a lot of /. readers come from Texas? Or many people have visited it? I don't get it.
We need something that can filter small bits of submerged debris. Something is the ocean.
We need to train baleen whales for the job. ...with lasers!
Besides, this is old news. The Pacific Vortex [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirk_Pitt] was written up 25 years ago.
--
Errors have been made. Others will be blamed.