Just came across following
news :
A pile of trash in the ocean has grown to the
size of France — and some people want it recognised as a nation
Will the Trash Isles be the world's 196th country?
By
Akshat Rathi
19 DEC 2017 - 10:43
AM
UPDATED 20 DEC 2017 - 9:58 AM
-----------------------------------------------------------
There’s a
country-sized problem in the north Pacific Ocean — a patch of trash
has grown to the size of
France.
So the environmental
charity Plastic Oceans
Foundation has paired up with the news and entertainment
publication LadBible to campaign for it to be recognised as an official country.
The
campaign claims that, under Article 1 of the 1993 Montevideo Convention on the
rights and duties of states, a country must be able to :
·
define a territory,
·
form a government,
·
interact with other states , and
·
have a permanent population.
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch
has borders ( sort of ), and it’s easy to create a government and institutions
for interacting with others.
Now with former US vice president Al Gore signing up as the
country’s first citizen
and more than 100,000 signing the petition to be granted citizenship, the campaign has submitted its application earlier this month to
the United Nations to recognise the Trash
Isles as
the world’s 196th country.
The project is the brainchild of
advertising professionals Michael Hughes and Dalatando Almeida, according
to AdWeek.
Designer Mario Kerkstra helped create a flag, a passport, currency (called debris) and stamps.
I just got reminded of my following blog :
Monday, 25 April 2016
No use Fighting !
Entire world
produces 280 million tons
of plastics , every year
Of this , some 20 million tons finds its
way into world's oceans
Rest finds its way
into ugly land-fills
A very tiny percentage of this has accumulated at one spot in Pacific Ocean
It is called Great
Pacific Garbage Patch , , covering an area , twice the size of United Kingdom ( approx 500,000 Sq Km )
Since most of this
is non-degradable , it will continue to float for 50 years
Hundreds of
scientists and governments are working for years to find a solution to this
problem of cleaning up the ocean by removing floating plastic
But the solution is
evading !
Use of current
method of skimming will take several decades to clean up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch
But if some method can be found to ,
* Increase the thickness of the
patch to several hundred feet
* Bind the loosely floating plastic with some glue / resin , to turn it
into a
strong land like mass ( of course , still
floating )
* Build onto this light weight pre-fabricated homes
then ,
it could become a
Nation of 126 million
inhabitants ( twice the
population of UK , since Pacific Garbage Patch is twice the area of UK )
!
Of course , if this
method succeeds , 280
million tons can create an entire continent , the size of Europe ! Every
year , too !
May be scientist can even find a way to tow it away anywhere !
For EU threatened with an influx of a million migrants
every year , this could be a much cheaper - and humanitarian - way of housing them
Much cheaper than what Elon Musk / Mark Zukerberg / Jeff Bezo
etc are spending on Space Missions to locate inhabitable distant Earth-like
planets !
Why spend billions
of dollars on finding ways to bio-degrade plastics ?
Just find a way to "
Re-Use " it for benefit of poor people !
Call it USM ( United States
of Migrants ) !
===================================
24 Dec 2017
www.hemenparekh.in
/ blogs
No comments:
Post a Comment