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."
Where are the Pictures of Garbage Island? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Tiny bits... (Score:3, Interesting)
Singapore, as a tiny island in the middle of (not-quite) nowhere, was also initially unprofitable. Look where it is now.
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 cans were still common back then. Pictures of fish and animals stuck inside of six-pack plastic rings [google.com] 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.
Re:Something is missing here (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.
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:Get off my lawn. (Score:2, Interesting)
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 think the answer is quite simple: if discarded on land, degradable is best. If discarded at sea, nondegradable is best. One possibility is to switch to nondegradables in coastal areas, but a more interesting one would be to develop a plastic that doesn't degrade in the presence of salt (or any other chemical present in the oceans but not commonly present in large quantities on land).
Re:Plastic People of Recyclistan (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Hyperbole (Score:2, Interesting)
"... you may have to drag a net for a couple of thousand zig-zagging miles to do it.
Gulf fisherman could be paid to do that instead of not fishing
Re:Tiny bits... (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:Hyperbole (Score:2, Interesting)
You mean people don't line their wastebaskets with shopping bags? You guys must be made of money. I only buy trash bags for the kitchen or big jobs. Unrecyclable stuff goes in old shopping bags-- reuse! We built up a surplus of these bags recently, so we recycled them. We try to use durable bags for small purchases, but it's simply impractical for grocery shopping. Also, I'm sure that one of these days some rent-a-cop is going to harass me in a store for walking around with my (empty) shopping bags.