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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 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.
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!
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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.
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... 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.
That's why the linked articles didn't have any photos. It sounds like a boring photo op.
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?
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Hundreds of years ago it seemed like lunacy to dry out land with big fans, but the Dutch figured out a way to do this. Only a pessimist can say in this preliminary stage that they'll definitely fail in this scheme.
And if pessimists were the drivers of technology, we'd still be living in caves and calling science magic.
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).
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Not quite so.
It does not look sufficiently impressive on film. A degraded bottle every few tens if not hundred meters does not make a good photo op. There is also a lot of dispersed plastic in the water itself. However, it is not something which you can picture, post and shout: "See how we ravished the Earth". Definitely nothing that can make the same kind of statement like a picture of a pelican dipped in BP produce.
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Los Angeles is not so well known for its great recycling scheme... can you tell me more about it?
To be honest, to a naive European, America as a whole is known as the most wasteful society in the world - but perhaps we're wrong?
Grandparent is alluding, I think, to the rate of plastic surgery in Los Angeles.
LA is probably the most wasteful city in our wasteful nation.
The key phrase there is "equal effort".
The plastic and other debris will get gathered either way. The difference is that one way you either melt into blocks and sink it or ship it to a landfill, and the other way you go through the massive money and energy expenditure to convert it into building materials and assemble it on site into a floating recycled modern utopia.
As well intentioned as this proposal is, we will never, ever get to the point where the cheapest source of building materials is a container vessel full of assorted sea flotsam. There will always be renewable lumber, glass from or inexhaustible supply of silicates, and presumably soon plant-derived plastics that will be competitive with oil-derived ones. If we decide it's worth the investment to clean this thing up, the garbage will go to a landfill where it will either be recycled or not. But under no circumstances will the economical to build it into a floating disneyland on site. A floating garbage-packaging plant maybe, but why return the recycled plastic to make a city? Use cheaper materials instead. Or better yet, stick your new city on land within reach of a desalination plant, and not stick yourself with the engineering constraint of making everything float.
I'm all for fixing the environment, but this specific proposal is economic nonsense. I'm sure it'd be cool to live in a shiny eco-neutral star trek paradise, but wishing will not make this actually work.
4,000,000,000 kg / 10,000,000,000 m^2 = 0.4 kg/m^2
Anyone else have a problem with this?
I think the implication is that once you've gathered the stuff and made a big block of molten plastic, it's trivial and very cheap to turn it into a flotation tank. It's the initial manufacturing step that's the hard bit, and if (big 'if', I agree) you can make it in the first place, you might as well make it into real estate instead of boat anchors.
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I guess the issues are removing tiny particles of widely distributed plastic from an area of the ocean twice the size of Texas while at the same time not removing everything living from said ocean. Apparently most of the particles are no bigger than a grain of rice, so any system to sieve them out of the ocean would likely scoop up anything larger than plankton. I've not heard any specifics about how they plan to perform the separation.
I tend to agree. Sometimes the shit you can see just distracts your attention from worse shit that you can't... //to do: insert joke about politics here
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Just like the floating junk armada in Neal Stephensons Snowcrash novel isn't it?
Absolute best fiction book I've ever read.
Nonsense.
Everyone knows that any and all initiatives to preserve the one and only planet we have at our disposal are part of a massive liberal conspiracy to swindle hard-working hard-spending 'merkins out of their money. Right?
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I've watched several specials about the Gyre including the one you linked - NONE of them show anything like the picture you linked which I suspect was taken elsewhere and not in open water. It's not good and probably pretty bad but sadly it's not picture fantastic else you better believe the CNNs of the world would be going nutz to photo it much as they have the birds BP has harmed...
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Let's not forget that this is way the hell out in the ocean, many miles from land. You can't just send out skimmers like we can for the oil spill, because (a) something that small really has no business being that far out and (b) there's no way you can have enough fuel on board to get there and back, so you'd need a lot of logistics work.
It's not impossible, just impractical, and given that it's not on anyone's drive to work no one thinks about it. It's "way the fuck over there". The NIMBY crowd is happy because there are no backyards nearby. Cleaning it up is unprofitable and the amount of effort is way out of proportion with the accolades any group would ever hope to get from undertaking such a monumental effort.
Imagine the reaction: "Wow! The ocean looks the same as it did before! I feel so good about that $10 billion we spent!"
I'm not saying it's not worth doing, only that making people believe it's worth doing is goddamned hard. They don't see the chemicals entering their food chain, because CNN/Fox don't show it as a graphic on the 6 o'clock spews. We have other disasters closer to home that will keep people's attention and sell more ads for plastic shit (that then gets thrown into the ocean, of course).
So an all-out effort and solving the problem ain't gonna happen anytime soon.
However, who says we have to solve the problem in a year, or a decade? How about affordable, smaller-scale, longer-term, less dramatic attempts?
Example: some form of solar-powered autonomous robotic skimmer that can skim the plastic and compress it into bricks, and/or use it as fuel directly? There'd be no real rush to the project, so you could build a relatively small number of them, drop them in the middle of the mess, and have them at least start to make a dent in it. Even if each robot could only clean up a few hundred square meters a day and make a few bricks, it's crap taken out of the water that used to be in the water. It's not dramatic, it's just a bunch of real-life Wall-E's out there getting shit cleaned up.
They could operate slowly enough that any fish could swim out of the net with no problems, while plastic particles rather lack any kind of mobility last I checked. :)
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Remember that your barrel is built of plastic which breaks down in seawater and sunlight. You'll have to keep replacing barrels.
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.