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."

Comments

Hyperbole

[Beardydog]

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.

Re:Hyperbole

[Beardydog]

Wait, I've got a smidge more raving to do...

This story also reminds me of the women who recently spent three days walking around in pink shirts to raise awareness of breast cancer. They blocked traffic extremely frequently, often appointing themselves crossing guards in areas that already had lights, giving each other permission to walk in front of cars while people tried to get to and from work.

I certainly sympathize with them. I know a lot of them have lost friends and family, and they want to do something for the cause... but honestly, we're all aware of breast cancer. All of that pink shirt money, time-off-of-work money, organizational money, etc could have gone toward research. Or it could have just not gotten in my way for three days, and I think we would have all been better off. If one person had been carrying a donation bucket for research, I would have felt a hundred times better about it.

So they're building an island and making a symbolic effort at cleaning? Fantastic, I never drive through the Pacific ocean on the way to work. But they aren't making a dent in the problem, everyone with a pulse already knows about pollution, and they're misrepresenting the one problem they're even engaging in.

Actually solving actual problems usually takes a lot of money, a lot of cooperation, and and a lot of work. It isn't showy, and chicks won't think you're hot for doing it. Not everybody involved in it gets to be a manager, or collect a paycheck from their non-profit employer, or be interviewed by the local news while they hold a sign that gives heart disease a severe textual talking-to.

And I know a lot of people are doing that kind of work somewhere, but the campaigns that make the news are always awareness, or people who want to -feel- like they're fighting the good fight.

We need more plastic!

[kainosnous]

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.

Re:Something is missing here

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Plastic People of Recyclistan

[captainpanic]

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?

Re:Plastic People of Recyclistan

[Entropius]

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 Numbers

[mosb1000]

The Pacific Vortex as it is sometimes called, is made up of four million tons of Plastic.

Recycled Island would be 10,000 Km2

4,000,000,000 kg / 10,000,000,000 m^2 = 0.4 kg/m^2

Anyone else have a problem with this?

Re: Valuable Waste

[delinear]

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.

Re:It's actually worse

[Hognoxious]

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