The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, from the Daily Galaxy

Dear Friends:

Recycle, now, everyday, in every way imaginable. Do we want to have swamp oceans filled with plastic? It's easy...RECYCLE. Please care about our home planet. Until we can venture to other worlds this is the best home we have...we may just find that what we have mistreated is far better than anything else out there in the universe.

Give a hoot...RECYCLE!

Peace,

Janet from Janet's Planet

April 14, 2010

Billionaire Eco-Explorer David de Rothschild's Vision: Turn the Great Pacific Garbage Patch into Habitable Island

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a vast vortex of plastic trash that spans hundreds of miles northwest of Hawaii, has gotten lots of attention ever since billionaire adventurer and environmentalist David de Rothschild announced his plans to visit the trash mass on the Plastiki, a boat constructed from recycled waste and webs of plastic. Now the Plastiki has launched, and a group of architects from Rotterdam have already come up with a plan to covert the gyre into a Hawaii-sized island made entirely out of recycled plastic.

The entire project aims to focus global awareness on the thoughtless, unnecessary damage plastic inflicts on the world’s oceans. And potentially guide people towards more constructive ways to re-use plastic.

“What I hope that the Plastiki does and what we stand for is not about vilifying people, pointing fingers or just articulating problems,” de Rothschild told Circle of Blue in October. “We are about challenging that thinking.”

The UN Environment Program estimates that there are 46,000 pieces of plastic litter in every square mile of ocean, and a swirling vortex of trash twice the size of Texas has spawned in the North Pacific.

Plastic bags, once icons of customer convenience, cost more than 1.6 billion barrels of oil per year and leave the environment to foot the bill. Each year the world produces 500 billion bags, and they take up to 1,000 years to decompose. They take up space in landfills, litter our streets and parks, pollute the oceans and kill the wildlife that eat them.

Sadly, marine researcher Charles Moore at the Algalita Marina Research Foundation in Long Beach says there’s no practical fix for the problem. He has been studying the massive patch for the past 10 years, and said the debris is to the point where it would be nearly impossible to extract.

"Any attempt to remove that much plastic from the oceans - it boggles the mind," Moore said from Hawaii, where his crew is docked. "There's just too much, and the ocean is just too big."

The trash collects in this remote area, known as the North Pacific Gyre, due to a clockwise trade wind that encircles the Pacific Rim. According to Moore the trash accumulates the same way bubbles clump at the center of hot tub.

Ian Kiernan, the Australian founder of Clean Up the World, started his environmental campaign two decades ago after being shocked by the incredible amount of rubbish he saw on an around-the-world solo yacht race. He'll says he’ll never be able the wipe the atrocious site from his memory.

"It was just filled with things like furniture, fridges, plastic containers, cigarette lighters, plastic bottles, light globes, televisions and fishing nets," Kiernan says. "It's all so durable it floats. It's just a major problem."

Recycled Island is a research project on the potential of realizing a habitable floating island in the Pacific Ocean made from all the plastic waste that is momentarily floating around in the ocean. The proposal has three main aims; Cleaning our oceans from a gigantic amount of plastic waste; Creating new land; And constructing a sustainable habitat. Recycled island seeks the possibilities to recycle the plastic waste on the spot and to recycle it into a floating entity. The constructive and marine technical aspects take part in the project of creating a sea worthy island.

It sounds crazy--and maybe it is--but Rothcild's idea makes sense. The biggest concentration of plastic in the ocean has a footprint as large as France and Spain combined. That means there is plenty of plastic already floating around to make an island. And wouldn't it be nice to provide future climate change refugees with a new sustainable home? Not that anyone would necessarily want to live on a hunk of floating plastic, but the idea of taking trash and turning it into something useful is always thought-provoking.

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De Rothschild has made a career of exploring ecological challenges, and using his wealth to popularize environmental issues. The youngest heir to the fortune of one of Europe’s oldest and most respected banking families, he journeyed across Antarctica and explored the Greenland ice cap to witness the consequences of climate change firsthand. In 2005 he launched Adventure Ecology, an organization and a Web site that tracks his travels to inspire people to work for positive change for the planet.

His Pacific plastic bottle mission is a way of reconnecting life style choices to nature, an idea that has become his mantra.

Follow the Plastiki’s progress at the Plastiki Expedition Web site. To read more about the de Rothschild expedition, please see Circle of Blue’s earlier de Rothschild coverage.

Sources: Plastiki Control Center, SFGate.com

http://www.fastcompany.com/1614864/architects-want-to-build-a-habitable-recycled-plastic-island