Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/07/18/modular-floating-park-made-of.html
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Why can’t we do this over the entire world’s seas / oceans / water ways?
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Thanks, Andrea, how encouraging, what a wonderful thing!
Next step, close the loop and make the recycled island self reproducing. I’m in for the kickstarter! 
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These are in fresh water rivers, where there is little salt to inhibit the growth of terrestrial plants. You could grow something like glasswort in a very high salt environment, but not deciduous trees like in the photos on the website.
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So basically it would be possible to do this here in Austin? I can see the Colorado River from my front door.
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Austin has no snow and above average number days of sunshine. I would expect this to work really well. Assuming your 4 meter hexagon (2m per side) doesn’t clog river navigation.
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Too much red tape, I suppose. I know around here in southern Ontario, the rules surrounding large floating vehicles are fairly stringent.
I’ve seen city parks with just as much unclaimed plastic debris strewn about. The floating park is a marine riff on that.
This sounds great, and should be applauded. But I do wonder one thing.
How long before this plastic begins to deteriorate and start flaking off into the water as micro-plastics? This is one of the current problems with waste plastic in the sea. Unless this has been considered and accounted for, I remain unimpressed.
Seriously.
They took all the plastic out. Degraded the polymer chain by heating it. Then put in back in the water.
Fuck them.
The usual answer, which I’m sorry to say is both realistic and a huge downer: economics.
If you watch the video you’ll see a ton of people bagging, filtering, sorting through the waste in a large facility, and even more people making the platforms. That’s a huge labor cost and unlikely to be made more efficient or automated. Recycling plastic takes a ton of energy and produces weakened plastics, which will probably degrade faster in the river.
The challenge to cleaning up waterways isn’t figuring out how to extract stuff, it’s how to extract stuff cheaply. This is why whenever I see videos like this with “inspirational” backing soundtracks, I’m skeptical that the end product will do much good. Too many good feelings, not enough engineering.
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