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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."
We already have that. It's call Los Angeles.
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!
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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?
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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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.
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
That's why the linked articles didn't have any photos. It sounds like a boring photo op.
Nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
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?
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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.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
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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.
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.
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!
Glue rocks to them.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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.
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.
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
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.
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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...
Windmills do not work that way! Good night!
Conscience is the inner voice which warns us that someone may be looking.
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 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.
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?
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
Let me know when you figure out a method to glue 1 trillion individual molecules to pieces of rocks.
Buy lots of glue.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
Obviously, with 1 trillion little metal-foil tubes of superglue. Don't be daft.
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.
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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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.
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)
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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.
Some more info with location here-ish: http://www.greenpeace.org/international/campaigns/oceans/pollution/trash-vortex/
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.