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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."
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?
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.
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
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
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