One Man's Giant Pacific Garbage Patch Is Another's Beautiful Island Nation

This sounds more like Waterworld and less like an island paradise.

How can they create a cohesive landmass with a bunch of plastic and trash? Tie it all together?

Why not just skim it all up and bring it back to the mainland to recycle?

--GTO--

While I also enjoy fantasy, and making up facts to support unique ideas, I am a little shocked at this story. Did nobody do a little research? Did we not do a quick google search on the Giant Pacific Garbage Patch, aka the Pacific Gyre?

There is absolutely no giant island of garbage in the pacific, as many people seem to believe. There is a gyre of particulates suspended below the water surface, made up largely of plastics and garbage, but it is suspended in the water column.

There is no raft or island of garbage. The environmental impacts of the suspended garbage are there, but goodluck containing a bunch of particulates and making them dense (and bouyant) enough to create an island.

These Dutch folks are proposing an idea without any knowledge of the actual situation.

This idea is absurdly bad. The cost of getting plastic out of the gyre, due to how spread out it is, and how expensive ocean operations are, is at least 100x as much as getting it out of a landfill. If you don't see people flipping landfills for a 10,000% return, then it's a money-loser to get plastic out of the gyre. There are much more fun ways to burn money.

Surely they wouldn't just let the bottles float beneath the "island" to make it buoyant, right? Plastics decompose in the water as well, so they'd have to contain them somehow. The question is how they'd do that.

Did anyone actually click on the link and visit their page? Sorry but that looks like some 5th grader in 2001 built that page with HTML for a school project. My absolute favorite part is their little Adobe Flash animation titled "Heating the Plastic" where it shows an MS Paint-esque illustration of a giant barrel with bad .GIF looking fire under it. There's alot of very unprofessional graphics on this site, their text explanations are no more than one sentence on some pages, and after about 2 minutes of browsing I am thoroughly convinced that this site is a total joke. WHIM architecture = bored BRYCE user.

I'm pretty embarrassed for Mr. Clay Dillow, author of this article...maybe he should put more than 5 minutes of Googling into his work. Or maybe PopSci has lowered its employment standards...

So are they planning on building giant Duplo blocks to build the houses? If thats the case I'm all in. How fun would it be to live in a life size lego island!

Hmmmm, maybe there should be another article on popsci about how a new miracle method has been found that can rapidly and cheaply collect, move, bind and make bouyant spread out particles. That could be real news.

Check out our site www .nerdherd .ucoz .com (Without the spaces before the dots)

What the hell is wrong with you people???

Has it become a crime to have a VISION?

The article states that some "visionaries" are looking at the idea and all you can do is condemn the idea because it hasn't been done???

It's assholes like you who are totally destroying the world and taking away any possibility of something like this ever happening...

This is a place where people should be encouraged to dream of things that don't already exist...

I sincerely hope that none of you are in positions of teaching young people how to do things - how to dream and finding new ways to do things...

The world has enough problems without people like you.

Do us all a favor and go crawl under a rock!!!

@Instgtr: Even though you're a troll, I'll answer so no one else gets confused. Proposing ocean-sized water filters, giant house eating robots, and the other "ideas" that fall through the cracks and end up here of all places does not make you a visionary. It's about the same thing as saying, hey, if we had hyperdrives we could just all move to a nice, unspoiled planet! Call me awesome now cuz I's so smart and no one thought about this easy fix before!

You're awesome, Solace... not just for your ingenious suggestion about the new planet, but also because you live near the Bionic Woman....

Solace - now THAT is visionary! I like your idea better... let's all just go to another planet and when we destroy that one in a couple hundred years, we can move to another one! Brilliant! :)

superpocoyo

let's start with the fact that you've never had sex.

then let's ruminate on that for a second, while we consider your non-existent intellect and keen interest in adobe products. you stupid flippant #$*&. Wow, somebody studied a little HTML. (You mean you actually visited the site - I'm sure that the author didn't...) That's amazing how you throw around those smart terms. What, are you in college, or fresh out? This is like that gay scene in that Matt Damon movie where Ben Affleck doesn't suck. You know, with the Harvard guys? And Robin Williams. You're that other gay guy in that scene. The one at the bar with the big-headed hottie and that other guy that has long blonde hair - you're that guy. The guy that doesn't get laid. And I feel bad for even making that metaphor, but seriously, you're that lame.

And if you say, "heating the plastic" one more time i might get all excited. Seriously.

Love, I Morked Mindy

superpocoyo

Google your lameness.

Wow you made a username just to attempt to insult me and one other person? Awesome lol. Also your sexualization of Mork and Mindy just proves that you're the virgin. "Oh MINDY!!" *fap fap fap*

P.S.: I'm a girl. Not a gay dude.

Those darn Dutch, the next thing you know they'll be come up with silly ideas like adding 20% more landmass to their country by putting up dikes and living below sea level. And what's even worse is that they are happy. [They are bunch of delusional socialist ding dongs.]

What really ticks me off the most about them is that they stole my idea.