Land reclamation is when new land is made where it used to be water. This practice is used mostly in areas with high population density. Soil, sea sand, swamps, and the bits of garbage it those are materials that form this "new" land. Either two small islands are formed into a much bigger one, or swamps can be reclaimed to be more useful land. This option solves problems of too much garbage and not enough land to put it and also that of too many people and not enough land for them to live on. There are many problems with this though. It is very expensive to make new land. It is environmentally looked down upon because it destroys the habitat by reducing the amount of water in the world and because of the chemicals from the materials that affect the water.
One example of land reclamation is the Hong Kong International Airport at Chek Lap Kok Island, which increased the land area of Hong Kong by 1%. This airport covers 12.48 km² of reclaimed land between Chek Lap Kok Island and Lam Chau. It took six years to build this airport, with the financial support of 4 major sponsors because it cause more than twenty billion dollars. It had to be split into 10 separate projects, 225 contracts with construction groups, and over 1000 critical interfaces. This maneuver was necessary because Hong Kong is a major international port and the population per area is very high. The former airport, Kai Tak Airport, was much smaller and getting old. In fact, when it closed there was only one runway for planes to land on. Landing was made even more difficult because of the high number of skyscrapers and mountains less than 10 km north of the airport and less than 5 km from the east side. The runway stuck out into the Victoria Harbour and was made by reclaiming land from the harbour and had already been extended several times. More mountains in Hong Kong Island are further south of the airport. Also, it was in a residential area in Kowloon Bay, Kowloon, and very loud for those who lived around there. Apparently these six story buildings across the road from the northern end of the runway were so close that airplane passengers have claimed to seen the residents' television sets through the windows of those apartments while their aircraft was nearing the landing strip. This showed how low of an altitude the planes had while being barely 10 km away from places that people lived in.Another place were land reclamation is present is Singapore since the 1960s, and this happened on a large-scale basis. The reasons they needed to take materials and form it into land on the ocean is because the country was very small (581.5 kilometres squared) and the rising population. The reclaimed land is used for building more private and public housing estates along with recreational facilities and expanding commercial and industrial activities and transport needs like roads, expressways, the Mass Rapid Transit System, the port, and airport facilities.
http://library.thinkquest.org/C006891/reclamation.html
I think the idea of land reclamation is a good way to turn something like garbage into something useful.
ReplyDeleteHere are some other ideas that Professor W. Yim of the Department of Earth Sciences at Hong Kong University responded with in an email on ways to reduce garbage in the oceans:
"(1) Reduce population
(2) Reduce consumption
(3) Reduce waste disposal through recycling
(4) Increase fine for ocean disposal of garbage by ships
Note - Garbage disposal in landfills is NOT so bad providing that the garbage is
separated into different categories at the landfill for future recycling.
Eventually they will become a resource."
Personally I don't know if reducing the population would be such a great idea because I think there are other alternatives and a drastic proposition of reducing the population seems difficult for the whole world to comply to.
Actually, despite all the benefits that land reclamation has, there has to be a reason why so many environmentally friendly organizations do not encourage it. I think the chemicals used to make that land escape into the water, which would mean that only half the problem of garbage in water would be solved; there would be garbage used to make something useful but garbage that we cannot see like gases are still emitted into the fish's and our environment. I think I would only recommend this solution if it was necessary to create more land for the growing population of a certain area. I wouldn't just take garbage out of a landfill and use it to add onto the land by Alaska for example. There is not really a need for more land in most areas.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, if the movie "The Inconvenient Truth" by Al Gore were true and our continents were slowly becoming submerged under water, I would start preparing to add land to those areas that are below sea level before the depth of the water gets too deep and land reclamation is then very costly.