Slashdot Mirror
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."
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
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
Welcome to the Plastic Beach
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".
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.
convert plastic INTO island. Problem solved DUH!
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
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
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..
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).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Hey if they can make islands from sand and sell luxury houses on em I'd guess just about anything is possible. They have to do something about that trash .
"We are just a war away from Amerikastan. When god vs god the undoing of man." Dave Mustaine
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.
the island will gradually be turned into whatever they're recycling the plastic into
You're assuming humans stop throwing away plastic. There are already four million tons of plastic there, and it's growing larger every day.
And, as the people involved in the project are interested in sustainability, something tells me they'll adjust their capacity so they don't accidentally destroy the platform they recycle on.
That entirely depends on how fast trash is flowing into the collection. The patch is constantly being fed with new crap thanks to our amazing lack of ability to throw it in the trash.
Initial production may consume whats there now to build the installation/boat/whatever it turns out to be, but then it lowers to something sustainable over time eventually leveling off.
Its not like if everything out there disappears it won't be back in a couple of years.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
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
The Pirate bay was looking to form a nation not long ago. I think they'd be interested in maintaining a plastic "country", whether or not the real scientists are interested in sticking around. And frankly, at the rate we're contributing to the vortex, they will probably grow over time.
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.
Joyless? You need to get out more.
But to those who don't get it, I hear if one keeps repeating, "Cheeseburgers love me! They do!" then it is possible to dull the mind and keep up the farce of 'living' for another day.
Problems will not be solved via engineering because those in a position to task out such projects are all psychopathic loons who will never see the light. (Note how BP's solution seems to revolve around turning the Gulf region into a corporate police state rather than fixing or cleaning anything. That's what happens when you put psychopaths in charge of engineers.) Psychopathic types are fabulously delusional and self-destructive and nobody has begun to ponder how to remove them from power. By the time we get to that point, it'll be far too late.
That's how these cyclical de-population trends work.
-FL
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?
I have a see issue, but my optometrist isn't Dutch.
Obviously the plastic is still coming from somewhere, it's not like aliens dropped it there one night.
This is a joke. I am joking. Joke joke joke.
Small correction, we dried it out with pumps, powered by windmills
I I were an absolute pedant 'd point out that windmills grind corn, so the pumps were powered by wind turbines. In Norfolk they actually called them "wind pumps"
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.
Small correction, we dried it out with pumps, powered by windmills
I I were an absolute pedant 'd point out that windmills grind corn, so the pumps were powered by wind turbines. In Norfolk they actually called them "wind pumps"
If I were an absolute pedant I'd point out that windmills used to grind corn. Nowadays they just stand around and creak and smell of old wood.
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...
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...
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.
Windmills do not work that way! Good night!
Conscience is the inner voice which warns us that someone may be looking.
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...
If I were an absolute pedant I'd point out that windmills used to grind corn. Nowadays they just stand around and creak and smell of old wood.
Since this has now become a pedantry competition I feel obliged to point out that not all of them do.
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
Twice the size of Texas.
"People in the west" is not all americans. There are actually people (and governments) working to solve issues like this, to make sure we can continue leading the lives we currently live.
This is blinging
Just like the floating junk armada in Neal Stephensons Snowcrash novel isn't it?
Absolute best fiction book I've ever read.
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?
Actually, a lot of the windmills in the netherlands are still in operation. More for historical purposes than anything else, but nevertheless. A lot of folk in the area where I live get their horse feed etc. from a couple of windmills.
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
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?
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
I I were an absolute pedant 'd point out that windmills grind corn, so the pumps were powered by wind turbines.
If I were an absolute pedant I'd point out that turbines are supposed to have enclosed blades.
It's only ignorant journalists who equated 'power station generators' with 'turbines' when only the bit converting the steam to motion was, then equated 'turbines' with 'giant impellors shaped like airplane propellors stuck on stalks all over the countryside'.
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'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.
Wow aspergers much? GP's description was poetry. Geez man, literature is even something the Dutch are famous for.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
*Morbo voice*
WINDMILLS DO NOT WORK THAT WAY!
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
This sounds like the greatest delivery system for recycling ever conceived. I can dump my trash into a river and it will eventually end up being recycled on an island in the middle of the Pacific. All transportation taken care of by Mother Nature.
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..
Hundreds of years ago it seemed like lunacy to dry out land with big fans
WINDMILLS DO NOT WORK THAT WAY!!
-Morbo
Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats. -HLM
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.
Good thing we've got biodegrading plastic!
Breaking Into the Industry - A development log about starting a game studio.
Didnt they already do this in a Gorrilaz video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MypXWl_uBCU
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".
windmills used to grind corn. Nowadays they just stand around and creak and smell of old wood.
Quite a number of them also attract tourists (and their money), I would imagine.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
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!
"The Raft" in Snow Crash was more like a cluster of really ghetto DIY houseboats, and it was possible to navigate a boat through it...not exactly a garbage island. Here's a part where Hiro is looking at satellite/aerial images of The Raft.
Right out there, a couple of hundred miles off the Oregon coast, is a sort of granulated furuncle growing on the face of the water. Festering is not too strong a word. It's a couple of hundred miles south of Astoria now, moving south. Which explains why Juanita went to Astoria a couple of days ago: she wanted to get close to the Raft. Why is anyone's guess.
Hiro looks up, focuses his gaze on Earth, zooms in for a look. As he gets closer, the imagery he's looking at shifts from the long-range pictures coming in from the geosynchronous satellites to the good stuff being spewed into the CIC computer from a whole fleet of low-flying spy birds. The view he's looking at is a mosaic of images shot no more than a few hours ago.
It's several miles across. Its shape constantly changes, but at the time these pictures were shot, it had kind of a fat kidney shape; that is, it is trying to be a V, pointed southward like a flock of geese, but there's so much noise in the system, it's so amorphous and disorganized, that a kidney is the closest it can come.
At the center is a pair of enormous vessels: the Enterprise and an oil tanker, lashed together side by side. These two behemoths are walled in by several other major vessels, an assortment of container ships and other freight carriers. The Core.
Everything else is pretty tiny. There is the occasional hijacked yacht or decommissioned fishing trawler. But most of the boats in the Raft are just that: boats. Small pleasure craft, sampans, junks, dhows, dinghys, life rafts, houseboats, makeshift structures built on air-filled oil drums and slabs of styrofoam. A good fifty percent of it isn't real boat material at all, just a garble of ropes, cables, planks, nets, and other debris tied together on top of whatever kind of flotsam was handy.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
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
Also on facebook as: DroppingAcidDaleBewan
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.
Windmills do not work that way!
Do you know that for sure? I have a sneaking suspicion that as soon as mankind masters interstellar travel a bunch of meatballs from Jersey are likely to do just that to some other planet.
Made of plastic or not made of plastic, it doesn't matter... This whole thing will only work once we perfect the ZPM.
All plastic is biodegradable, being organic... tends to degrade in to some not so nice things . . . it's usually the additives to the plastic being released during degradation that are bad
You're just changing the definition of biodegradable
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
Mockery? it's an accurate statement. Control you emotions and think.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
You're just changing the definition of biodegradable
Nope, I was just using it correctly rather than in the incorrect sense that seems to be becoming relatively popular. Biodegradable: Can degrade through biological means. Seems like a sensible definition to me.
By the way, don't even get me started on "organic" foods...
My book about LSD and Self-Discovery
Also on facebook as: DroppingAcidDaleBewan
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.
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.
Not only that, but the article and wikipedia's write up disagree on a key point. E.g. from wikipedia:
The size of the patch is unknown, as large items readily visible from a boat deck are uncommon. Most debris consists of small plastic particles suspended at or just below the surface, making it impossible to detect by aircraft or satellite.
Even the photo for the slashdot submission is 'off'. We seem to be talking about tiny particles of plastic. Not even something you can see, let alone build a structure upon.
Parent is right: "lunatic scheme"
Remember that your barrel is built of plastic which breaks down in seawater and sunlight. You'll have to keep replacing barrels.
Obviously the plastic is still coming from somewhere, it's not like aliens dropped it there one night.
I'm not much for conspiracy/outlandish theories, but it would be interesting to see where any current or recently de-commissioned deep sea oil wells were in relation to this ares (particularly any that have had Halliburton, Transocean, or BP involved). Maybe we're looking at remnants of various Junk Shots.
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?
When I first came here, this was all ocean. Everyone said I was daft to build a castle on an ocean, but I built in all the same, just to show them. It sank into the ocean. So I built a second one. And that one sank into the ocean. So I built a third. That burned down, fell over, and then sank into the ocean. But the fourth one stayed up. And that's what you're going to get, Son, the strongest castle in all of Pacific.
The thing is, it's *useful* to have a word that means "degrades quickly through biological means" whereas we've got very little use for a word meaning "degrades eventually through biological means if you don't mind waiting a few lifetimes, more or less".
Same thing with "organic" for that matter. It may not be perfectly logical by your standards, but it's plenty useful for getting specific information across.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
So why have you guys stopped? Can't you reclaim more land from the sea?
"All plastic is biodegradable" needs a citation. As far as I can tell, A lot of degraded plastic got degraded by ultra-violet light and weathering, rather than biological activity.
"it's usually the additives to the plastic being released during degradation that are bad" And are those additives biodegradable? Some of them could be poisonous enough to kill biological activity and prevent the degradation of the plastic containing them.
By the way, the word organic existed long before chemistry got ahold of it and used it with a chemical definition
Crap, copy and paste seems to have failed.
organic
Would you happen to have a daughter-in-law (in a very real and legally binding sense) with huge... tracts of land?
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
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).
"That entirely depends on how fast trash is flowing into the collection. The patch is constantly being fed with new crap thanks to our amazing lack of ability to throw it in the trash."
Throwing the plastic "in the trash" is a part of the reason it's making its way into the ocean. We should be recycling it *on land*, before it even has the chance to make its way into our rivers/oceans. Considering how much oil it needs to be created from "scratch", we should be striving to recycle as much of the already existing plastic as we can anyway...
bork bork bork!
I just wanted to tell you that I enjoyed your recent article in Internet Toughguy Magazine. You were the author of the "Idle Threats from Idle Hands" column weren't you?
Don't blame me, I voted for Cthulhu.
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.
We dont want to get to close to those wackey brits, next thing you know they'll be placing camera's on their coastline to monitor what we do!
In all seriousness, i dont know really, but i suspect all the easy stuff is done, most land we reclaimed was inside the original borders, and these days people get all upity when you want to pump a nature-reserve dry and put a bungalow-park in there...
People, what a bunch of bastards
Wow, Hansen's Disease much? Seriously though, very colorful. Poetic. I rate this threat two thumbs up!
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
But what will they call it? New Newark NJ? Vortex Island sounds too much like a SyFy movie of the week.
Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
Who the hell mods you "offtopic" for helping to clean the racist trolls out when they have been up-ranked?
bioplastics, biodegradable ones for packaging.
I know tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack.