Man (Re)Builds Mexican Island Paradise on 250,000 Recycled Floating Bottles | Hacker News Reader

Man (Re)Builds Mexican Island Paradise on 250,000 Recycled Floating Bottles

ecoble.com

49 pointseru16 comments

I met this guy Richie in Tulum in 2005, just after hurricane Gilberto tore up his first island. He plays guitar. His plan to rebuild his island was to charge admission. I imagine that's how he's paying for it, but he started by hand. From the video, sounds like the Mexican government wants a piece of the tourism action, so sounds like Richie wants to teach his island to travel.

That island was washed ashore by a hurricane in 2005 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiral_Island). He has since built a second island. More info here: http://www.spiralislanders.com/

On the spiralislanders.com site:

"First tour group... when we arrived we were blown away!"

Made me chuckle, anyway.

Very cool, short video. This guy has the right idea, esp. since the housing market is collapsing and lending is going to get really tight, not to mention the low environmental footprint of this "island."

One thing I wish they had asked him, though. What happens when the bottles/nets begin to deteriorate? (Does he replace bottles on a revolving basis?)

The logical solution would be to have a depth marker of some kind, and to simply add new sacks of bottles whenever it drops below some value (regardless of the cause of the drop).

Yes, and to be environment friendly you should also clean up stray bottles.

If bottle failures are contained within the sacks this shouldn't be necessary. If bottle failures aren't contained within the sacks...well, good luck.

Add a GPS receiver to each bottle.

Ok, you have to wait at least a few years until the receivers have become cheap enough to make this worthwile. Perhaps RFID will be there faster. Perhaps bottles will even come with RFID chips from the factory.

The sacks are fishing nets... Degraded plastic would probably slip through. Popped bottles should be contained though.

Plastics degrade into smaller plastic particles. Assuming the land mass above them is sufficiently rough to entangle rising particles, the degraded material would still provide buoyancy, and simply contribute to the underlayer of the island.

Plastic is heavier than water; are you suggesting that plastic bottles degrade into smaller plastic bottles?

That would be so cute!!!

Where does he have the money to do this from? It must be quite expensive. Does he work in insurance or something, and this is his hobby?

The video says he moved to Mexico and started collecting bottles for cash. I imagine that at first he wanted a super-simple lifestyle and then decided that this would make a great hobby.

I don't think he has much money but he has a lot of time and the skills (he was a carpenter) to make it happen.

Ah, so that's why those homeless people keep stealing bottles out of my trash.

What I want to know is this:

What kind of internet speeds does he get on his island?

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