The Plastic Plan

Interesting concept about how to construct an Island from waste to create a platform for renewable energy.

Here’s the easy version.. It all begins with the common everyday plastic bottle. Bottles together with their screw on caps can be strong and long lasting flotation devices. Bottles in urban areas are often cluttering landfills or trucked off for expensive, wasteful, carbon producing methods of recycling. I propose that we collect these bottles (Save the Cap) and put them into strong, reinforced, plastic mesh, cube shaped bags. Cubes roughly 2.5 meters (8 feet) in size. Sized locally to fit onto local trucks and trains. We transport these bags to harbors by river when possible, or by light truck and rail. Once in the harbor these bags will be grouped together and floated out to sea. Just far enough out to sea as to not be visible from land. The cubes will then be assembled by light crane and by hand, cube by cube, into an enormous platform . Each cube connected to the cube above it, below it and to the cubes on all four sides. For what purpose? you may be asking.

Well to begin with, the bottles are no longer in the landfills and thats a huge benefit. We now have them contained out at sea and we shall arrange them in a manner perfectly suited to be a energy producing and storage platform. So the basic premise is we are making a elevated reservoir. Meaning we use every renewable means available be it solar, solar electric pump, wind, wind turbine pump, or wave/current powered pumps and we strategically mount them on this platform ,of cubes of bottles, with the goal of pumping sea water 30 meters or more up into the reservoir. Water is pumped into the reservoir by hundreds or thousands of clean energy pumps . The same amount of water is released through just a few large “dam” size hydroelectric turbines at the bottom of the platform. This process takes the fluctuating energy produced by many small solar, wind, wave pumps and transforms it into a much stronger more reliable clean energy. Electricity, strong enough to be cabled to shore and to be transmitted over the existing power grid.

As far as I know, to date, this has been the missing link. How to convert clean renewables (solar, wind, wave) into a reliable, transmittable, industrial strength energy source? I think this is the “holy grail” of clean energy. The worlds biggest battery in a sense.

We are basically building a dam , on its side, out of bottles. For scale think 3 Football stadiums stacked on top of each other, with 1 of them above the water. It will be like a iceberg with most of its mass below the surface possibly even sinking all the way to the sea floor in some locations. Which is fine. Hydroelectric power (falling water)is known to be one of the cleanest forms of electricity production. The world is running out of dammable rivers. This solves that problem, plenty of sun, sea water, waves, wind, and gravity. These islands can be built offshore of cities and not only produce energy but control and eventually recycle a large portion of that cities and other upriver cities plastic waste. This giant machine should operate for many years producing clean electricity. Constantly growing, rebuilding, and recycling itself. These floating elevated reservoir platforms “bottle islands” can be the solution to the worlds energy problem. A way to make wind, solar, and wave/current power more effective. This method is much cleaner and much less politically divisive than the burning of fossil fuels and/or nuclear power.

We can skip the whole bottle process at first and make more efficient floatation devices to expedite and perfect the island’s building process and design. However the bottle process is beautiful, beautiful in the sense that it solves many problems at once, many city landfills are already stuffed with bottles. Energy has already been used creating bottles and will continue to be used to create more bottles. Using bottles as a building material recycles energy that will otherwise be wasted. The bottle method should be implemented, ASAP. Using something that people throw away anyway is crucial to making a positive impact on carbon emissions sooner. At first, energy will be wasted all over the project (manufacturing of pumps and solar panels, transport of cubes, building of island etc.) and using the bottles as building blocks negates much of that waste. Billions of bottles already exist, more and more everyday. Think about if we had to build these islands out of steel, each the equivalent to 50 or more cruise ships. Billions of dollars and large amounts of energy wasted.

Eventually we can recycle all manner of bottles and containers in this fashion. I envision bottles all over the world being redesigned and collected to fit our needs, by law. Strong with caps that dont come off.

Beautiful as it is, the bottle method is inefficient in the sense that the islands own weight, the deep water pressures, and the weight of the water in the reservoir will crush and disfigure the cube shaped building blocks. Some bottles will break and cubes will become flatter and more cubes will need to be added during construction to compensate. We will need millions of bottles. The First Island or cluster of islands would ideally be located at the mouth of a river, a river with many cities upriver. The first island/s should also ideally be located in a warm climate to avoid any freezing while perfecting the design and process.

I see the Gulf of Mexico offshore of New Orleans being the perfect location for the first cluster of islands.

Municipal governments will buy our bags and/or pay us to take their bottles. This “bottle island” method of energy production, if operated as a business, could turn a profit before it produces its first watt of power.

After the first island is online producing electricity, the energy it produces can be used to produce more islands and island components and we will be on our way to a clean energy future.

Source http://plasticplan.org/

June 29th, 2009