Some people have realized that our interference with the planet’s ecosystems is in most cases disastrous and have come with several ideas to diminish our influence on the environment. Industrial designer Chris Allen has come up with an idea to use plastic bottles that we usually throw away to help generate energy from wind.
A huge impact on the planet have the mountains of waste that we create because of our indifference. We mostly buy things we never use, or use a short period of time. We eat more than we need, and we have clothes that we don’t remember to ever have worn. When we clean up our house, most of the unusable things go to the garbage. Some things from that garbage could still be used or could have a purpose in generating clean energy. The idea is to combine two of the major problems we have: lands filed with waste and pollution.
Waste contains in a high percent plastic bottle. Chris Allen has thought to a way use the thrown plastic bottles in a project he calls “The plastic plan“. To be viable, the project requires millions of plastic bottles with the caps on so they entrap air. Many bottles put together will form thousands of cubes which can float on the ocean’s surface and put together they can form an offshore structure, similar in size to three football fields stacked one on top of the other. The gigantic structure can shelter many types of energy generation systems to harvest wind, wave and solar energy. The structure can float near major cities where this energy is needed mostly.
How does it work? Very simple Chris Allen explains: “the basic premise is we are making an 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.”
The plan is to install a first cluster of plastic bottle islands in the Gulf of Mexico offshore of New Orleans, considered by Chris Allen the perfect location at this moment.
Let’s see this put in place soon to get rid of many plastic bottles that cover the lands which could be used in other purposes. Even if it’s only a dream, this could be someday in another form a dream come true.
