Human beings make a lot of trash. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a mass of garbage and debris that is floating in the ocean. It is the largest amount of trash on earth. It poses a major threat not only to the surrounding wildlife, but to the entire planet. There has not yet been a successful effort to clean up this trash, but not all ideas have been tried. Richart Sowa is an artist who lives off the coast of Mexico on his own floating island. His island is made of recycled bottles and other trash, with layers of soil and dirt on top of it. He has planted trees to hold the dirt and recycled materials in place, and has made his own mini-ecosystem. If this idea is implemented correctly, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch could become a manmade, eco-friendly island. Another idea is that of the Trash Wheel. The trash wheel is a solar powered paddle boat that travels around the harbors of Baltimore and Annapolis. These trash wheels have picked up over one million pounds of trash from the harbors. Being from Baltimore, I have seen there effects myself and I thought that their idea could work for this as well.
Sources so far-
MailOnline, Jenny Awford for. “No man is an island: British DIY Robinson Crusoe builds his own floating paradise off the coast of Mexico out of 150,000 recycled bottles – and now he’s found his Girl Friday!” Daily Mail Online. Associated Newspapers, 07 Nov. 2014. Web. 06 Feb. 2017.
Summary: There is a man in Mexico who has constructed his own island. He has made it out of layers or plastic bottles, sand, and topsoil. The recycled bottles have bene strung together so that the Island floats. He has a house, air conditioning, and even a hot tub on his floating paradise. Well after some time on his island by himself, he has found a woman to live with him. It’s a true Adam and Eve story.
Hoshaw, Lindsay. “Afloat in the Ocean, Expanding Islands of Trash.” New York Times. 10 Nov. 2009. Web. 06 Feb. 2017
Click to access new_york_times_article.pdf
Summary: A gyre is a term for a swirl or vortex caused by ocean currents. In one of these gyres off the coast of Hawaii, there is something called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. This garbage patch is a mass of collected garbage. Be it cans, bottles, styrofoam, or tiny bits of plastic, it is all collected together in a mass that is roughly the size of Texas. The patch is harmful to surrounding wildlife, and must be dealt with.
Kaiser, Jocelyn, Jocelyn Kaiser, and Science18 Jun 2010 : 1506. “The Dirt on Ocean Garbage Patches.” The Dirt on Ocean Garbage Patches | Science. N.p., n.d. Web. 06 Feb. 2017.
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/328/5985/1506.full
Summary: The great pacific garbage patch has been called a “trash vortex.” It is not the mucky collection of bulky garbage that many believe it is. Mostly it’s pellets of plastic. This is caused by the plastic breaking down in the ocean. The result is many animals dying from eating these pellets, thinking they are plankton or some other food.
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Counterintuitive 
King, please do me the favor of providing links in your sources. I’ve made one to your Science source as an example. I do want to help you evaluate the credibility and relevance of your sources, so links are essential. This one goes only to the Summary, with a link to the full text that appears to require a subscription or purchase. Were you able to follow through to the article by using the Rowan database? If so, provide a link to the full article. Thanks.
The story you’ve selected is pretty fantastic as a symbol of both a problem and a solution. But it’s a very small and extraordinarily impractical solution unless you can boldly envision the next several steps that would expand and scale it.
150,000 plastic bottles is nothing to sneeze at, but how many guys with nutty notions to build islands out of them would be required to even begin to slow the migration of these bottles into the ocean?
In other words, you’re on the track of some out-of-the-box thinking that could develop into a clever paper on waste recycling. I applaud the notion, but you’ll have to find an angle the Guardian ignored. Crusoe Found His Girl Friday will not cut it. So, where are we headed with this?
Helpful at all, King? I too appreciate feedback. For best results, keep the conversation going.
Sorry about the sources! I accidentally cited the download page instead of the sources themselves. They are pdf articles that i downloaded, after I got them off of Google Scholar. As for the bottle islands, I do not claim to know the engineering or the science behind it, I am simply proposing that they start to use out-of-the-box ideas such as this one. Maybe with some engineering-tweaks, this idea could be the solution that is needed for such a problem
Agreed.
Okay, list 5 sources. LINK THEM! Also provide purposeful summaries.
Looking forward to the new material! 🙂