【推荐2】A large, self-sustaining, floating research lab, as big as an island, could be the next big project in ocean cleanup.

The 8th Continent, as it’s called, has won the Grand Prix Award for Architecture and Innovation of the Sea, and is designed to allow the operators to live, work, eat, sleep, and study full-time there. The 8th Continent is a water lily-like ocean station that’s tied to the bottom of the sea but designed to float in the ocean current.

The chief designer said, “It is shaped into a living organism that is fully self-sustainable and held to host some activities along with its chief mission of cleaning up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch covers a 900, 000-square-mile area, given a typical feature by high-density of plastic waste, and is being cleaned by large nets that use the ocean currents to help collect plastic waste.

“I look into marine species, animals and plants. And I study how they really interact with the water environment, how they can obtain energy and how they work with nutrition,” said Senior Designer Lenka Petrakova at Zaha Hadid Architects in London.

The three long legs of the station collect the passing plastic waste and tidal(潮汐的) energy to change them into electricity. Sitting on top are three research and education centers under three tall greenhouses including gardens and a water desalination(海水淡化) plant. There are the living and working areas, where collected waste is sorted and recycled, while the underwater draft spire(尖塔) will contain a viewing platform. At the moment, it’s a big dream, but the design is still charming and beautiful to see.

【推荐3】Ocean water can be used to cool buildings. This idea could help cities reduce their carbon footprint and slow climate change. Although plentiful, ocean water is too salty to drink. But it could serve as an important and still largely untapped resource for many coastal cities. The idea came to Zi Zhang shortly after she moved from Michigan to Hong Kong a few years ago to get a PhD in engineering.

In 2013, Hong Kong built a system that used seawater to cool part of the city. The system pumps cold seawater into a plant with heat exchangers. The seawater absorbs heat to chill (冷却) pipes full of circulating water. That chilled water then flows into buildings to cool their rooms. This type of system tends to use far less energy than typical air conditioners. Zhang wondered: How much water and energy had this way saved Hong Kong? And why weren’t other coastal cities doing this? Zhang and her team set out for answers The group focused on Hong Kong and two other big coastal cities: Jeddah and Miami. The idea was to see what it might look like if all three adopted city-wide saltwater systems. The cities climates were quite different. But all three were densely populated, which should minimize some costs.

All three places would save lots of freshwater, the researchers found. Miami could save 16 percent of the freshwater it uses each year. Hong Kong, with more non-drinking-water needs, was saving up to 28 percent. Estimated energy savings ranged from just 3 percent in Jeddah to 11 percent in Miami. These savings came from the more efficient saltwater air conditioning. Also, the cities would need less energy to treat salty wastewater than they have been using to treat sewage now.

Though costly to build, saltwater-cooling systems could pay off in the long run for many cities. And because these systems use so much less electricity, they’re greener and emit (排放) less carbon-rich greenhouse gases. Scientists refer to this as a type of decarbonization (脱碳).