A LOAD OF RUBBISH

Features - Earth

Illustration by Paul Willoughby

Turning trash to terra, one man in Mexico is on a mission to change the face of the earth. But could his ecological epiphany have any bearing on our fair shores?

Words by Clare Howdle

(First published in Stranger 04 - May 2005)

The start of the summer season. Hoards of tourists pack their bags and start their annual jaunts to the sunny shores of Kernow. On arrival, it's just a short ferry ride out to Newquay Island, where a large, luxurious holiday camp provides all the creature comforts imaginable, just 500 metres offshore from Britain's premiere holiday resort... Hold on. Newquay Island? Metres off Towan beach? A floating tourist haven allowing locals and 'emmets' to exist in perfect harmony? Surely someone has been taking crazy pills. Nonetheless, mind-altering drugs aside, could something so far-fetched really be part of our future?

Cut to the Quintana Roo coast, Mexico, five years ago, where a lone Geordie had an ecological epiphany that not only changed his life, but could change the world's waste disposal and overpopulation problems simultaneously - with a little lateral thinking.

Richie Sowa lives on an island. He built it himself. Out of 300,000 plastic bottles. Lush banana and palm trees nestle on the shores of his tropical man-made paradise; almond bushes surround his three-storey house; every morning he awakes to the sound of the birds nesting in the island's trees, and every evening he falls asleep to the gentle rocking of his home-made island.

"The idea is that we can actually create a piece of beautiful land on the top of absolute trash," says Richie. He dreamt up the idea for a floating recycled island 20 years ago, but it was only at the turn of the millennium that he turned those REM sessions into something palpable. "I would walk around town every morning and literally just pick up the bottles from the shoreline," he explains. "Then I filled fruit sacks with the bottles, and fastened them in a chain. When it got to about seven metres, I started spiralling it and covering it in bamboo and palm branches."

That was just the beginning. The island now measures 16m by 23m, and is still growing. Richie's plans are ambitious to say the least: "The island is a tiny baby, just being born, so there are still endless possibilities - from wave-powered generators to bamboo telephones." It sounds ridiculous, but then, so does the idea of building an island out of bottles. Until you see it.

Bottle Island off Quintana Roo coast, Mexico

"We couldn't believe it really," says Simon Cooke, who was so blown away by Richie that he plans to produce a TV series to tell everyone about the island. "I thought it would be just a big raft, but then I got there and saw really lush vegetation and a beautiful house built on what felt like solid ground - we were knocked out by it." Simon is not alone is his reaction; every day Richie receives up to 100 visitors who have heard about the island and want to see it for themselves.

But what relevance does an eccentric Geordie in Mexico have to life on a little peninsula jutting out into the other side of the Atlantic? It all boils down to rubbish. Loads of it. Cornwall is starting to drown in domestic waste and it's not only the environment that is paying the price. Since April, government landfill and waste limitation initiatives have meant that councils are fined £150 per tonne of rubbish exceeding the allowed limit. Cornwall is expected to be around 15,000 tonnes over. "Ultimately the fines will have to come from council tax," admits Paul Martin, Waste Disposal Manager for Cornwall County Council. "However, the emphasis should be on devising an effective waste management strategy which will help us reduce the excess and stay within
the landfill limits."

With £2.25 million looming, United Downs rubbish dump close to bursting and recent uproar surrounding the increasing illegal export of recyclable waste to developing countries, disposing of rubbish is a hot topic. That 'waste management strategy' had better be pretty damn effective. Suddenly the Richie Sowa method of clearing the trash excess doesn't seem quite so crazy - 15,000 tonnes of rubbish yields a lot of island-building material.

So we have the means, we have the coastline, but is it actually feasible? Let's face it, Cornwall is hardly the balmy Gulf of Mexico, and when you trade exotic fruiting plants for an island covered in gorse and daffodils it somehow loses its appeal. Not to mention the weather. According to oceanographer Tony Butt, it's all a matter of size: "Cornwall has a really high wave climate, meaning lots of energy and storms flying around would make the survival of a floating island like Richie's very difficult," he says. "If an island was built to the same specifications as Richie's, it would float over the waves like a cork, so would get battered in the storms but could pretty much withstand them.

"However, once the size of the island exceeds the average wavelength in Cornwall (between 50-100m), all sorts of problems would ensue," he continues. "The wave would literally travel through the island, impeding its speed (thus affecting the inshore environment) and damaging the island irrevocably. Building a floating island in the UK? It's a nice idea, and would probably work on a small scale, say, in Falmouth harbour, but it wouldn't stand a chance on the North Coast."

So that settles it then. No surf school islands or tourist resorts off Newquay. Just a few little islands floating around Falmouth for all the chavs - sorting Cornwall's waste surplus and Falmouth's townie surplus in one fell swoop. I love it when a plan comes together.

For further information on Simon Cooke's TV pilot 'The Man from Spiral Island' contact Simon on 07966 228742.

www.spiralisland.co.uk

www.swell-forecast.com

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