The Recycled Ocean Plastic Resort is Slated for Completion In 2025

2022-08-20 23:43:46 By : Mr. qing zhu

By 2025, there could be an artificial floating island resort made from Indian Ocean garbage off the coast of Cocos (Keeling) archipelago – a remote Australian territory consisting of a chain of islands located 2750 kilometers northwest of Perth, Western Australia. The Recycled Ocean Plastic Resort is a first-of-its-kind project, hence why they strive to accept visitors by that date. Regardless of when it is ready, it will be an icon and an inspiration to people everywhere, proving that ocean waste is not useless garbage but a resource. The “junk” shouldn’t pollute our oceans but be collected and put to noble use.

The architect that dreamt up the ingenious plan is from a British international design firm called Margot Krasojević Architecture. Margot Krasojević wanted to reduce how much garbage is floating out in the Indian Ocean by using it as a building material to create a sustainable luxury floating island resort while keeping environmental care of the utmost priority. Local ecosystems in the region have been damaged by plastic pollution, and her project aims to address this hands-on and through awareness.

The concept is to float the eco-resort on piles of ocean waste. Margot Krasojević was moved by images of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and got a vision of a “Trash Island” as the foundation for a resort. This base will consist of reclaimed ocean waste-filled bags (including glass, rubber, and plastic pollution) woven together and anchored to the ocean floor. For stability, the bags will be weighted down with sand and silt.

She said in a statement:

The inspiration came to me when I saw the Pacific Ocean’s flotilla of plastic, an area twice the size of France just floating in position because of the currents. In addition, tourism is changing to be more environmentally conscious as holidaymakers look to be more in tune with their environment.

Plastic is malleable and flexible so that it can be reprinted, reformed, or broken down and rebuilt. I personally think it a better alternative than dumping it in a landfill.

These [mesh-filled bags] would be woven together to provide a heavily-anchored platform fortified with Mangrove tree roots that would wind around the mesh-filled support bags to provide stability and flood resistance, with additional layers of silt and sand heaped atop it all.

Part of this first step (the foundation) is walkways. The walkways and the base are one. The walkways will be installed first, atop buoyancy devices, and secured to the ocean floor using tension leg structures like those used on oil rigs. These legs will have the bags attached to them. The bags will gather free-floating trash as it passes, funneling it into mesh bundles that gradually fill and expand with ocean waste.

Manual labor will be required to distribute the material evenly within the mesh. Once full, the bags will be covered with biodegradable concrete fiber mesh, then sand and silt. As bags fill up and become the foundation, more walkways with new bags can be built on top, so the island will be ever-expanding. These walkways will be the network of paths that lead guests to communal spaces and private quarters.

The island can continually grow as more waste is trapped, but the scale of growth will depend on the island’s ability to evolve and how effective the construction efforts are. Krasojevic added:

An experimental project like this will need designing alongside the process of construction.

The second structural element is the “scaffolding” of artificial mangrove roots. These water-absorbing ‘tentacles’ made from rubber will help to prevent capsizing and redirect waves away from the island.

A major design element is a pleated structure of interlaced webbing, made from biodegradable-seeded concrete fiber mesh. These ‘tentacles’ are released from the ceramicrete upon contact with rising water levels. They expand and inflate into the oncoming swell, sinking as they absorb water creating an artificial barrier trapping sediment and absorbing floodwater.

[The tentacles] act almost like rescue rafts. They expand and inflate into the oncoming swell, sinking as they absorb water, creating an artificial barrier that traps sediment and absorbs floodwater.

Each fully immersed tentacle expands and falls on top of the next creating a temporary wall preventing water from flooding the island while supporting it in case of damage. Once the storm stabilizes, the tentacles are emptied. Then, using pumps powered by solar panels, the water is redirected off of the island and released into the Indian Ocean. The tentacles expand on impact with water pressure retaining the island’s buoyancy.

Mangroves have been used as a method of flood defense by capturing or trapping sediment to self-build a type of defense wall as well as acting as flood prevention due to their roots that swell and absorb the water, preventing the island from capsizing or sinking.”

The Recycled Ocean Plastic Resort will feature 75 hotel rooms on the floating island and areas to camp outside. It will open as a camping ground once the floating island is ready – before the hotel structure is built. The rooms will come complete with distilled seawater showers, everything powered by solar panels.

The hotel is a lightweight tensile structure, like a series of sails that can be stretched over a flexible carbon fiber frame. Foundations will be difficult, so we need something that can be anchored rather than buried into the substructure. The hotel will offer a compartmentalized series of canopied rooms. Showers would use filtered and distilled seawater pumped onto the facility using solar energy.

Further details remain scarce, and the firm admitted that since it is an experimental design, they hope for a completion date of 2025 but expect changes in the scheduling and design.

Krasojevic’s firm received the Recycled Ocean Plastic Resort commission from a South African mining company. It is financing the project to:

…contribute to building ecosystems and managing pollution because of the vast amount of toxic pollutants and waste generated by mining.

Sustainable manufacturing expert Claire Barlow, a senior lecturer in engineering from England’s Cambridge University, told CNN she welcomed all efforts to remove garbage from the ocean. However, she cautioned that construction must be executed in a way that avoids unintended environmental impacts.

It looks absolutely fascinating. In a small part of the giant jigsaw puzzle of dealing with marine waste, I think it’s a good idea. It’s in a sensitive part of the world blighted by plastic — so anything that can be done to reduce it is good. But there are indeed problems environmentally with building a hotel. There will be construction materials and additional traffic in that area. And then once the hotel is there, there will be people being taken to and from it.

The hotel needs to manage things like waste generated on the island carefully. It’s a bit ‘greenwash’ really — but it helps to raise the awareness of marine debris, so in a slightly cynical way, perhaps it’s a good thing to do.

Perhaps the Recycled Ocean Plastic Resort is best taken as food for thought regarding what we can do with (and about) the monumental ocean waste problem. Only time will tell.