By Deirdre Robert
Posted on July 6, 2010. Listed in:
The idea of escaping from the chaos of everyday life to the quiet and warm sanctuary of a tropical island for a break is appealing. But how would you feel about a tropical break to an island made entirely from plastic waste?
Welcome to your destination, Recycled Island.
Recycled Island is a research project exploring the potential of creating a habitable floating island in the Pacific Ocean made from, well, recycled plastic.
The concept is the brainchild of Netherlands-based WHIM Architecture, which plans to build the island (which will be about the size of Hawaii) in the North Pacific Gyre between Hawaii and San Francisco.
The concept project launched in March and has three distinctive aims:
- Cleaning the oceans by removing plastic waste;
- Creating new land;
- Constructing a sustainable habitat (possibly a new home for climate refugees).
The island comes complete with everything you’d find in an urban destination: residential housing, agricultural land, beaches and a tourism outlet. All built off the back of washed-up and recycled plastic of course - building the island would use an estimated 44,000 tons of plastic waste.
But is such an island economically viable, let alone doable?
“I don’t think you should see Recycled Island as a profitable investment in terms of money,” says the team at WHIM. “It is more that we really need to clean the ocean from the plastic pollution because of the damage it causes to marine life.”
The project is ambitious and it's viability is questionable, to say the least. You can draw your own conclusions by reading more here.
