Pacific Trash Vortex To Become Habitable Island? 323
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."
Plastic People of Recyclistan (Score:5, Funny)
We already have that. It's call Los Angeles.
Re:Plastic People of Recyclistan (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Plastic People of Recyclistan (Score:5, Informative)
No, it's not even close.
Dallas, Cleveland, Atlanta, Tampa, and Indianapolis are the top 5, in that order.
Re:Plastic People of Recyclistan (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Plastic People of Recyclistan (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Tiny bits... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Singapore, as a tiny island in the middle of (not-quite) nowhere, was also initially unprofitable. Look where it is now.
Re:Tiny bits... (Score:5, Funny)
Look where it is now.
Did it move? :)
Re:Tiny bits... (Score:4, Funny)
Yeah...they hired Reckless Kelly [imdb.com] to tow them to a more favorable position. :-)
*See end of movie. See ONLY the end or you will regret the experience, and truly hate me; if you have already seen the movie, you have my deepest sympathy*
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Well... scientists and engineers are able to filter micro-organisms (which are microscopic, and almost the same density as water - similar to our problem here)out of water , also when it's quite diluted. I am sure there's a way to get the tiny bits out.
The basic question is what the concentrated waste is worth per metric ton. If it's worth 1000 euro / ton, then quite a lot is possible... but it's gonna be an expensive island. If it's only 10 euro/ton, then the island is cheap, but only the crude bits will b
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Right on! Since we can't filter all the garbage out it isn't worth picking up ANY of the garbage at all.
Re:Tiny bits... (Score:5, Informative)
(b) Yes they are. According to the first link in TFA:
The tiny pieces of plastic are “the size of a grain of rice”, small enough to be eaten by fish. Chemicals, like “PCBs, DDT, and other toxins” that don’t dissolve in water are soaked up by the plastic. Those toxic chemicals get ingested by the fish eating the tiny pieces of plastic. Those fish are eaten by bigger fish that absorb the chemicals from the smaller fish. Ultimately, the contaminated fish may wind up on your dinner tables. We already know how dangerous these chemicals can be when ingested.
(c) If the plastic is indeed spread throughout the top several meters, then yes, there is.
Hyperbole (Score:5, Insightful)
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: (Score:2)
Re:Hyperbole (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Hyperbole (Score:5, Informative)
4,000,000 Tons plastic = 8,000,000,000 pounds
14,892 lbs/square mile - 23.29 lbs per acre. [2.61 grams/meter square]
Of course that is only surface area... how deep is it?
That is the whole (Score:3, Insightful)
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).
Re:Hyperbole (Score:5, Informative)
A study of marine debris near the center of the gyre as part of the Southern California Water Research Project found 334,271 pieces of plastic per square kilometer with a weight of 5.1 kilograms per square kilometer.[3]. If this 11.2 lb/km found near the center were the same throughout its estimated 20 million square kilometers expanse, the gyre would contain 225 million pounds or 113,000 tons of plastic waste. This is less than some estimates of from three to 100 million tons of plastic in the gyre.
Re: (Score:2)
4000000 tons of floating plastic is at least 4000000 m^3 in volume, which would allow to build a nice plastberg with dimensions 10x400x1000 m. This is a severe underestimate, so there is gotta be a way to make it into a floating plastic island with the area of about 1 km^2. Then we can throw some dirt on top and declare it an international wild-life preserve.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Scale (Score:4, Informative)
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.
It's actually worse (Score:4, Interesting)
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!
Re:It's actually worse (Score:4, Insightful)
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
Re:Hyperbole (Score:5, Informative)
I think (and I'm trying to clarify my own thoughts here, as well, instead of ranting ad-hominem, as I have been) that a lot of people see the mind's-eye seascape of bags and bottles of consumer and commercial excess, and the horrors of a throwaway culture.
The reality, as always, is more nuanced. Plastic bags and styrofoam cups a) go a long way toward reducing many other types of waste in our society, and b) will never go away, because they're so damn useful. Instead of railing against the very human behaviors that have created the problem or the very useful products that improved our lives tremendously for the last 60 years, we should probably focus on creating materials that break down more safely after they wind up in the ocean, or focus on our garbage gathering techniques, or hell, a couple thousand extremely expensive machines that sit in the Pacific and try to clean as much water as possible. Even that scenario is more likely than the societal changes that would be required to alleviate the patch.
End of Lunatic Ravings
Re:Hyperbole (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
I hope they know about thinkgeek... (Score:4, Funny)
If they could slice it up like one of those "all edge pieces" brownie pans, everyone would get beachfront property!!
The answer to our waste problems... (Score:2, Funny)
(1) Build a ****-load of WALL-E robots.
(2) Use them to fill the ocean with trash.
(3) Sell the land.
(4) ???
(5) Profit!
Slip up? (Score:2, Insightful)
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!
Where are the Pictures of Garbage Island? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Where are the Pictures of Garbage Island? (Score:5, Informative)
It's not visible, even when you're in the middle of it. It's tiny (mostly microscopic) pieces of plastic in the top several metres in higher concentrations than elsewhere. You need special instruments to detect it.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I'd really like to see a decent pic too.
Find a picture of the middle of the ocean. That's what it looks like.
Re:Where are the Pictures of Garbage Island? (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
It is a huge mass, it's just a huge mass of very very small pieces that you can't photograph.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
It doesn't exist in the form that is being presented in articles such as this. The numbers given by North Atlantic Garbage Patch page on wikipedia are "200,000 pieces of debris per square kilometre". This translates into one piece every 5 square meters. Keep in mind that in general these are broken down pieces (cm^2 scale or smaller). So, you won't find any pictures, because it probably isn't possible to take one that looks like anything. That having been said, the increased concentration of plastics is pro
Re: (Score:2)
As I understand it, this is an area in the Pacific Ocean where floating plastic bits accumulate due to ocean currents. In this area, the amount of plastic per unit area of ocean is far higher than in the rest of the ocean. However, the density the plastic bits is not remotely island like. You would likely not be able to see it from satellite photos. The best way to see it would be to sail there. and then to drag a fine screen behind the boat. When you pull in the screen, you would find quite a few litt
Its like a "plastic soup" (Score:2)
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
Someone's gonna be jealous (Score:2)
Rishi Sowa [wikipedia.org] is gonna be so jealous...
Chrissie Hynde (Score:2)
When Chrissie Hynde wrote about putting up parking lots and breaking up concrete, do you suppose she had PLASTIC parking lots in mind?
It Doesn't Know (Score:2)
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 (Score:2)
We need more plastic! (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Let's Go Global! (Score:5, Funny)
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?
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
But how many libraries of congress is that?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Stupid idea (Score:3, Funny)
Stupid... but cool as hell. There is such a fine line between stupid and clever.
Didn't somebody take a boat out there... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Didn't somebody take a boat out there... (Score:4, Informative)
Nothing Bizarre About It (Score:2)
And don't get me started on "slip up"...
Tiny Bits of Plastic entering the Food Chain (Score:5, Informative)
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 [orionmagazine.org]
http://www.mindfully.org/Plastic/Ocean/Moore-Trashed-PacificNov03.htm [mindfully.org]
Get off my lawn. (Score:2, Interesting)
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
Basic Math Failure?? (Score:3, Insightful)
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?
Basic maintenance failure (Score:3, Insightful)
Remember that your barrel is built of plastic which breaks down in seawater and sunlight. You'll have to keep replacing barrels.
Re: (Score:2)
They're not saying they will build the island from the plastic. They saying they'll build the island where the plastic is.
Actually they are saying that they will build it from plastic that they recycle from the ocean.
from their website, www.recycledisland.com:
On this location a new floating island will be made of all the recycled material found in the Ocean. This recycled island will be in the heart of the Oceans current, the North Pacific Gyre. In between the island Hawaii and San Francisco.
Starting point is to make Recycled island a similar size as (the main island of) Hawaii. This size is approximately 10,000 Km2. Of course the size depends on the amount of plastic that we can obtain and recycle from the ocean.
South Pacific Gyre (Score:2)
Ever get the feeling that. . . (Score:2)
More and more frequently, the news reads like segments from a Neil Stephenson novel. One of his earlier ones.
-FL
Turn it in to oil (Score:2)
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?
The Numbers (Score:4, Insightful)
4,000,000,000 kg / 10,000,000,000 m^2 = 0.4 kg/m^2
Anyone else have a problem with this?
Valuable Waste (Score:2)
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 handl
Re: Valuable Waste (Score:4, Insightful)
Nature's trash compactor (Score:2)
- Ricky, Trailer Park Boys
Stateless (Score:2)
Something is missing here - and you are culpable (Score:2)
Re:Something is missing here (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Something is missing here (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Something is missing here (Score:5, Funny)
I have a see issue, but my optometrist isn't Dutch.
Re: (Score:2)
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"
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
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 [birchamwindmill.co.uk] do.
Re:Something is missing here (Score:4, Informative)
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 [google.co.uk]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbine [wikipedia.org]
Sure enough the wind powered generators in the countryside are indeed powered by turbines; the turney bladey things you see are turbines.
Re:Something is missing here (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
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.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Something is missing here (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
And how do you propose making a concentration of individual pieces of plastics, chemicals, and other misc objects all heavier than water? And then not revive due to ocean currents bringing in more plastics from outside regardless?
Re:Sink it. (Score:5, Funny)
Glue rocks to them.
Re:Sink it. (Score:5, Funny)
Let me know when you figure out a method to glue 1 trillion individual molecules to pieces of rocks.
Buy lots of glue.
Re:Sink it. (Score:4, Funny)
Obviously, with 1 trillion little metal-foil tubes of superglue. Don't be daft.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Why would you do that when, for equal effort, you could make a self-sustaining self-powering island from it? One that you can then sell or lease out real-estate on for ridiculous prices, because it's the only remaining unpopulated temperate coastline in the world?
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
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 contain
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
a ratio of 40:1 between plastic and plankton sounds kind of high to me. but if you really want a picture [photobucket.com]- click on this.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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...
Re: (Score:2)
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 anyt
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Some more info with location here-ish: http://www.greenpeace.org/international/campaigns/oceans/pollution/trash-vortex/ [greenpeace.org]