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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."
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.
It's not visible, even when you're in the middle of it. It's tiny (mostly microscopic) pieces of plastic in the top several metres in higher concentrations than elsewhere. You need special instruments to detect it.
I'm unsure if "skeptic" is the right term, but a quick jaunt to Wikipedia ought to help. To summarize: it's a large area of the ocean where the concentration of plastic particles is significantly higher than normal. Most of the particles are too small to see and are essentially dissolved into the ocean. There are some bits of visible garbage floating along, but the patch still looks and acts very much like normal ocean.
What's this? Another weblog? On transit?
It doesn't exist in the form that is being presented in articles such as this. The numbers given by North Atlantic Garbage Patch page on wikipedia are "200,000 pieces of debris per square kilometre". This translates into one piece every 5 square meters. Keep in mind that in general these are broken down pieces (cm^2 scale or smaller). So, you won't find any pictures, because it probably isn't possible to take one that looks like anything. That having been said, the increased concentration of plastics is probably something that is worth being concerned about (scientifically, not in this hysterical fashion).
The reality of it is a lot worse than most people imagine. Instead of easily manageable, solid chunks of plastic it's in the form of tons of tiny particles. This makes cleanup extremely difficult as well as makes the plastic much more lethal to wildlife. Animals try to eat the colorful bits, mistaking them for natural food sources: http://coastalcare.org/wp-content/images/issues/pollution/plastic/bird-carcass.jpg
If the particles were chemically neutral, and harmless to see life it wouldn't be a problem at all, but I gather that the creatures in the area are greatly affected. The problem I have with most "Garbage Patch" reporting is more that they feel the need to "sex it up". The serious people of the world are capable of have care for and concern over environmental disasters that are invisible to the naked eye, but stories about the patch always seem directed at the same people who keep trying to pass 5-cent plastic bag taxes. It's become a mythical beast, a chimera whose dread legend is spread in whispers by folks who would probably be comfortable banning cars, but want no part of pebble-bed reactors.
I think (and I'm trying to clarify my own thoughts here, as well, instead of ranting ad-hominem, as I have been) that a lot of people see the mind's-eye seascape of bags and bottles of consumer and commercial excess, and the horrors of a throwaway culture.
The reality, as always, is more nuanced. Plastic bags and styrofoam cups a) go a long way toward reducing many other types of waste in our society, and b) will never go away, because they're so damn useful. Instead of railing against the very human behaviors that have created the problem or the very useful products that improved our lives tremendously for the last 60 years, we should probably focus on creating materials that break down more safely after they wind up in the ocean, or focus on our garbage gathering techniques, or hell, a couple thousand extremely expensive machines that sit in the Pacific and try to clean as much water as possible. Even that scenario is more likely than the societal changes that would be required to alleviate the patch.
End of Lunatic Ravings
Twice the size of Texas = 537,202 square miles
4,000,000 Tons plastic = 8,000,000,000 pounds
14,892 lbs/square mile - 23.29 lbs per acre. [2.61 grams/meter square]
Of course that is only surface area... how deep is it?
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
the killing birds part is pretty ugly, too.
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
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.
A study of marine debris near the center of the gyre as part of the Southern California Water Research Project found 334,271 pieces of plastic per square kilometer with a weight of 5.1 kilograms per square kilometer.[3]. If this 11.2 lb/km found near the center were the same throughout its estimated 20 million square kilometers expanse, the gyre would contain 225 million pounds or 113,000 tons of plastic waste. This is less than some estimates of from three to 100 million tons of plastic in the gyre.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
Small correction, we dried it out with pumps, powered by windmills
But yeah, half the country is below sea-level, if you have any sort of land/see issue, we are the guys to see.
People, what a bunch of bastards
It seems the problem with a lot of this particular type of plastic is that it's made to degrade quickly and it's literally disintegrating in the ocean, so a similar project (without heavy re-processing of the plastic) is not feasible. Still, with four million tons of it up for grabs I'm surprised people are dragging their feet over collecting it.
Where does it say the island itself is made of plastic?
From the article: "The island would be built where the trash is located and would convert the waste onsite".
Read on:
Cleaning it up is going to cost a lot of money and require a great deal of either scooping up the plastic and shipping it back to shore, or some sort of onsite recycling for building something like Recycled Island.
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...
Well the article (and other articles on the subject) are all very counter productive. They all suggest massive mounds of floating trash because it's easier for human minds to picture those as evil. This downplays the fact that the real danger are the chemical-laden particles of plastic being eaten by wildlife and entering the food chain. In other words, in trying to build people up into some kind of frothing state of hysteria, the people behind these articles are detracting from the issue and giving sceptics an easy out at the same time.
They're going to recycle the plastic into the island: http://www.recycledisland.com/materialization.html. BTW it has been done before: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiral_Island
I'm no pedant, but there's nothing in the definition of a turbine that says they have to be in enclosures.
http://www.google.co.uk/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=define:+turbine&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&redir_esc=&ei=rvI-TOmQNIjw0wSH-oyYBw
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbine
Sure enough the wind powered generators in the countryside are indeed powered by turbines; the turney bladey things you see are turbines.
Good thing we've got biodegrading plastic!
All plastic is biodegradable, being organic... the main problem with it is that the majority of it takes a VERY long time to do so. Another problem is that the stuff that does degrade somewhat more quickly tends to degrade in to some not so nice things to have floating around. (actually to be more strictly accurate, it's usually the additives to the plastic being released during degradation that are bad)
My book about LSD and Self-Discovery
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No, it's not even close.
Dallas, Cleveland, Atlanta, Tampa, and Indianapolis are the top 5, in that order.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
It isn't for big things like people. For little things that eat invertebrates the same size, it is a crisis. The plastic pieces are "feeding" the bottom of the food chain. Except that they don't have any nutritional value, and poison or choke up the stuff eating them. From a strictly concentration point of view, it's not overly scary. From a biological point of view, it is.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
I'd really like to see a decent pic too.
Find a picture of the middle of the ocean. That's what it looks like.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Some more info with location here-ish: http://www.greenpeace.org/international/campaigns/oceans/pollution/trash-vortex/