Nanobots or genetically-engineered bacteria could be used to
turn the Great
Pacific Plastic Patch into a floating island for people to live
and holiday on.
That's the hypothesis being floated by a
team of UCL undergraduate students, who want to make use of the
vast quantities of plastic currently floating in the world's
largest ocean, stranded by the North
The idea is their entry to iGEM, the world's largest
student synthetic biology competition. The Great Pacific Plastic
Patch is a serious environmental issue, as much of the world's
plastic waste ends up carried by surface currents into the middle
of the ocean where it slowly sits and breaks down under exposure to
That plastic doesn't just disappear, though -- it hangs around
on a microscopic level, making parts of the Pacific less like ocean
than a kind of salty plastic soup. Those tiny plastic particles
also enter the foodchain, with long-term health ramifications for
both animals and humans that are as of yet unclear.
Trying to find a use for all the plastic in the oceans is not a new concept, even if other proposals have involved
machines on a larger scale -- and it does seem as if some bacteria are
already happy to munch down on it. But the students have
taken a more interesting approach to dealing with ocean plastic,
asking the question: "What if we treated it like a resource?"
That means using nanobots or bacteria to make the plastic clump
together instead of breaking it down further. Once the plastic is
in big enough pieces, that leaves two options -- fish out the
plastic onto boats (who will take it to land, to be recycled), or
leave the plastic balls to get big enough to form a new island
people can live on.
This "Plastic Island", as they call it, will be a vast new land
floating in the Pacific, and they're seeking backers on Sponsume
to research the idea further.
The possibilities for creating new land out of stuff that's
floating around in the ocean anyway will be tantalising for seasteaders who dream of creating their own new countries --
but it's fair to say that any new Plastic Island will need a fair
bit of work before it becomes habitable for long-term residents.
You'd have to make sure it was a stable shape, for a start, and not
liable to capsize -- and you'd also have to build some kind of
surface (be it soil- or astroturf-based) which people would want to
walk around on. The amount of food you could grow on such an island
would be limited too.
All those issues, and more, are perhaps why the students stress
that the project is only in the theoretical stage so far, but
they're still offering backers the chance to own a piece of a
virtual Plastic Island if they donate enough (and you can see some of the "property"
that's been purchased already).
Hey, maybe one day that virtual hectare of land will become a
real hectare in the middle of the Pacific.