Geofeed

Live geo-feed of tweets about plastic in our oceans

http://socialapproach.com/ocean-plastics

via @livingarchitect

Island Made of Recycled Plastic

A team of Rotterdam architects wants to build a habitable island in the Pacific Ocean made out of recylced plastic.

It has received some harsh critique online though.

At long last, the Plastiki sets sail (photos)

http://news.cnet.com/2300-11386_3-10002869-15.html?tag=mncol

March 20, 2010 12:18 PM PDT

SAUSALITO, Calif.--At 9:30 a.m. PDT Saturday, precisely on time, the Plastiki, a "boat made of 12,000 plastic bottles" and the brainchild of banking heir David de Rothschild, set sail from a berth here in this town just north of the Golden Gate Bridge.

The Plastiki is not just the world's first boat made buoyant by discarded soda bottles. It's also a statement about the world's garbage problem, and the fact that most plastic bottles are thrown away rather than recycled.

The intent is to sail the boat 11,000 nautical miles from Sausalito to Sydney, Australia. It is carrying about 1,000 liters of water, meaning the crew will have to stop from time to time to resupply. But they have fishing rods onboard, so at least some of their food, in theory, will come from the sea.

Among the inspirations for the project, in addition to bring attention to the way humans are treating our environment, is the Kon-Tiki expedition, Thor Heyerdahl's 1947 trip across the Pacific in a boat that was a reproduction of an Inca raft.

In keeping with tradition, the Plastiki will pay even more homage to Heyerdahl. Among the six crew members is Olav Heyerdahl, Thor's grandson.

Here, the Plastiki is seen as it has just sailed underneath the Golden Gate Bridge and heads for the Pacific. Its journey has just begun.

Photo by Daniel Terdiman/CNET

Canadian teen discovers plastic-bag-devouring microbe

http://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/Bright-Green/2008/0523/canadian-teen-discovers-plastic-bag-devouring-microbe

Very relevant for the treatment of oceanic great plastic gyres.

By Eoin O'Carroll, Blogger for The Christian Science Monitor / May 23, 2008

As part of a science fair project, a Canadian teenager has come up with a way to get plastic shopping bags, which normally take up to 1,000 years to decompose, to break down in as little as three months.

Daniel Burd, a 16-year-old high school student in Waterloo, Canada, reasoned that, because plastic eventually degrades, there is probably some some microorganism out there that breaks it down. If that microbe could be identified, you could expose higher concentrations of it to plastic and break it down faster.

So Mr. Burd did just that. The Waterloo Region Recordexplains his experiment:

First, he ground plastic bags into a powder. Next, he used ordinary household chemicals, yeast and tap water to create a solution that would encourage microbe growth. To that, he added the plastic powder and dirt. Then the solution sat in a shaker at 30 degrees.

After three months of upping the concentration of plastic-eating microbes, Burd filtered out the remaining plastic powder and put his bacterial culture into three flasks with strips of plastic cut from grocery bags. As a control, he also added plastic to flasks containing boiled and therefore dead bacterial culture.

Six weeks later, he weighed the strips of plastic. The control strips were the same. But the ones that had been in the live bacterial culture weighed an average of 17 percent less.

Burd then went on to identify which one of the four bacterial strains in the culture was the one with the appetite for plastic. He identified two: Sphingomonas and Pseudomonas. The first one breaks down the plastic, and the second one helps the first one reproduce.

After some experimentation, he was able to get a plastic bag to degrade by 43 percent in six weeks.

His six-page report, which you can download here (PDF), concludes that the process he developed could be used on an industrial scale.

Plastic bags are usually buried in landfills or thrown into the oceans and surrounding ecosystems. The process of polyethylene degradation developed in this project can be used on an industrial scale for biodegradation of plastic bags. As a result, this would save the lives of millions of wildlife species and save space in landfills.

It's hard to understate the environmental catastrophe caused by plastic bags. Many of them end up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a swatch of trash twice the size of Texas that is estimated to be 80 percent plastic. A report by Greenpeace found that some 267 marine species suffer from either ingesting or getting entangled in the bags.

As far as anyone knows, Burd is the first to discover the plastic-devouring properties of this microbe. For his efforts, Burd won top honors at the Canada-Wide Science Fair in Ottawa, where he took home $30,000 in prizes and scholarships.

Through the gyre

Nice one page summary about the plastic gyres.
Larger image here : http://dkdesignstudio.files.wordpress.com

Boat Made From Plastic PET Bottles To Sail on 11,000 Mile Ocean Voyage

The Plastiki launches in Spring 2009 on a 7,500-mile route from San Francisco to Sydney

Plastiki Workshop GigaPan 1 | GigaPan 2

The Plastiki design brief calls for an off-grid habitation—a house in essence—that would function as the cabin for a catamaran. The middle of the Pacific Ocean is the ultimate off-grid site. At Architecture for Humanity (AfH), we are always searching for prototypes, systems and materials that have broad relief applications. As the Plastiki is literally composed of re-purposed materials and off-grid systems, anything we learn through the boat design/build process carries over into our housing and systems initiatives.

Innovation is challenging. The biggest challenge here was adapting a new material system (srPET) for what promises to be a demanding voyage. The Plastiki will literally float on post-consumer bottles nested within a re-purposed plastic panel system. The major challenge of naval design more generally is to reconcile the often contradictory demands of what makes a boat perform well and what people need on an extended voyage.

The adoption of the egg as a generative form is a clear example of ‘biomimicry;’ that is to say, looking to nature for design solutions. In this case, a strong shape was needed to handle wave and storm forces during the voyage. The design of the Plastiki cabin is informed by the shells of several long-term earth residents. Turtle shells, Horseshoe Crab armor, Dinosaur plating, and eggs all contributed to the overall form, fused plates and folds that comprise the cabin shell geometry.

Working with design team members, we are integrating waste and water systems into the cabin. The cabin shell is our primary source for collecting rainwater, which will be filtered and stored. Solar photovoltaic panels are arrayed on the shell roof. Other energy exhibits, such as wind, water, bicycle and possibly wave power are being situated on the deck along with a modern-day ‘canoe garden’ that echoes the on-board gardens of ancient Polynesian mariners who brought staple plants and animals on voyages to ensure their sustainability.

[CNN and Architecture for Humanity, gizmodo, thanks to Vahakn]

some safety equipment

floating gardens

Floating garden par Benjamin Graindorge, systeme de filtration naturel pour aquarium

http://libarynth.org/recovered_images

Original photos here: http://libarynth.org/recovered_images