Floating Island Parks Made From Plastic Pollution

This group is turning plastic pollution into floating islands for plant and animal life. Special thanks to Recycled island.

Transcript

00:00It's horrible that there's this amount of plastics floating around in the oceans.

00:26I really started to question if it would be possible to turn this horror into something

00:30beautiful.

00:31To reuse these plastics as a building material to create new habitats.

00:56So we just go with a group of volunteers or sometimes with a company into the harbor

01:05and then we just clean up the riverbanks.

01:08But what we also developed floating baskets which are just anchored in the river along

01:13the riverbank and the water runs through but the plastic stays behind and for us that's

01:18really an effective way of retrieving the majority of the plastics.

01:44There are birds nesting on our parks and we had some ducks which are nesting.

01:47These simple ways of making people enthusiastic, I think that's the biggest and most positive

01:52response that we're getting that actually the nature now or the animals are taking over

01:57our park.

01:58It's really beautiful to see.

02:08So we started this project as a test case saying okay if we can do this in Rotterdam

02:13then we should also be able to do this in Hamburg or we should also be able to do this

02:16in Paris or we should also be able to do this in Jakarta or Sydney or wherever.

02:32Just by putting the park in the water it's not enough.

02:34We still see there is a growing industry in the plastic and the plastic manufacturing.

02:41We still see that very much people they use a lot of plastics in their daily life.

02:47So we really have to emphasize what this project is about and of course also still to tell

02:52the story of the horror of the plastic pollution that still a lot of plastics is still entering

02:56our seas and the oceans and that we do have to find an effective approach.