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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!!
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Windmills do not work that way! Good night!
Conscience is the inner voice which warns us that someone may be looking.
Well the article (and other articles on the subject) are all very counter productive. They all suggest massive mounds of floating trash because it's easier for human minds to picture those as evil. This downplays the fact that the real danger are the chemical-laden particles of plastic being eaten by wildlife and entering the food chain. In other words, in trying to build people up into some kind of frothing state of hysteria, the people behind these articles are detracting from the issue and giving sceptics an easy out at the same time.
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.
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.