A Dutch engineer has a dream of collecting all the plastic refuse in the Pacific Ocean and using science to transform it into an island paradise.

From his office in the Netherlands, Ramon Knoester has been working towards building a prototype of his project, which seeks to one day use tens of millions of kilograms of plastic debris as raw building material.

Knoester, who is also a trained architect, estimates there is enough plastic floating in the Pacific to build a Hawaii-sized habitat, or an island about 10,000 square kilometres in size.

In theory, he would gather that plastic, heat it up, recycle it and use it to build his creation. To minimize the impact on the environment, Knoester would use solar power to melt down the plastic and avoid bringing in building supplies.

"The main idea at the moment is to add as little material as possible," Knoester told CTV.ca in a telephone interview from Rotterdam.

Knoester imagines that his so-called "Recycled island" would function as a totally green society, powered by solar and wind energy, living off its own agriculture and able to sustain itself at sea.

People would live there and the island would even draw tourists, as its proposed location between Hawaii and San Francisco would provide "the convenience of a location where the weather is always nice," Knoester told ABC News last summer.

But before he can go about engineering his plastic paradise, Knoester will first have to find a way of getting all that debris out of the Pacific.

"The main difficulty is how we're going to get at all these plastic bits without harming any marine life," Knoester told CTV.ca.

Knoester still has yet to put a price tag on his project and he thinks it would take years, at a minimum, to pick up all that plastic circling the globe.

After speaking to many people about his concept, Knoester said that the sheer scale of his idea "for a lot of people is really hard to handle."

Parsing the plastic problem

The plastic problem is not a new one and Knoester is not the first to try to figure it out.

Concerned environmentalists have been warning about the problem for decades, though there is some dispute about how much plastic is really out there.

Amy Fraenkel, a regional director of the United Nations Environment Programme, said the amount of plastic in the oceans "is very difficult to quantify."

Scientists have an understanding of the environmental hazards plastic causes as it breaks down and they know that people are using more plastic products as time goes on. But there is not a clear consensus on how much of that plastic is deposited in the waters around the globe.

"It's alarming that we don't have better data," Fraenkel told CTV.ca in a telephone interview from Washington.

Later this month, a group of scientists, policymakers and other experts will gather in Hawaii for the Fifth International Marine Debris Conference.

Fraenkel said the goal of the conference is to move towards "concrete solutions" on reducing the impact of harmful ocean debris, including the plastic that Knoester hopes to one day collect.

Knoester, whose island concept will be referenced at the upcoming Hawaii conference, only began thinking about the plastic problem a couple of years ago when he was reading a magazine article on the topic.

He was on board on airplane at the time and he looked down at the ocean below as he was reading.

"For about a year I started to look into the concept," said Knoester, noting that he found no project similar to his recycled island on the go during that time. Though, as noted on his website, he did take inspiration from a floating lagoon built out of recycled materials in the late 1990s, and a plastic bottle-catamaran that sailed across the Pacific Ocean last year.

After some initial exploration of the concept, Knoester launched a website to promote his project and has since done dozens of interviews about his island intentions.

He has consulted with experts and he plans to build a small prototype to prove the concept.

"I don't really have the expertise in creating these floating objects yet," he said.

Knoester said the preliminary sketches for his prototype could hit the web by the end of the month.