Architectural designer and visualiser Honglin Li has proposed deploying floating high-rise waste-to-energy plants fuelled by plastic waste to clean up the oceans while generating electricity.
The sci-fi proposal, called Filtration Skyscraper, imagines placing unmanned towers on abandoned oil rigs in parts of the oceans where plastic waste accumulates.
Sophisticated machinery in the conceptual towers would generate electricity and biofuels from plastic and other pollutants extracted from seawater.
"It involves converting an abandoned oil platform into a vertical recycling skyscraper," the designer told Dezeen. "It could filter the floating garbage and clean the seawater while taking on the world's energy crisis."
Honglin Li proposes placing the towers in the so-called Great Pacific Garbage Patch, where billions of plastic particles have accumulated in a rotating current called a gyre. Honglin Li imagines building the Filtration Skyscraper atop abandoned oil rigs in the ocean
"It is envisioned for the North Pacific Gyre, which is the largest and thickest garbage patch in the sea," he told Dezeen. "However it could be deployed worldwide to solve environmental and energy problems."
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch contains an estimated 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic, although most of these have broken down to confetti-sized pieces that are thinly dispersed over an area the size of Texas. Just three per cent of the plastic in the gyre is th...