About Floating Islands

Floating Islands are buoyant mats, planted like a garden and launched onto a waterway. Floating Islands are made of layers of plastic matrix bonded together with marine foam. The foam provides buoyancy as well as adhesion. The plastic is 100% recycled polyester, PET, sourced from drink bottles, though other forms of plastic could be used. The foam is polyurethane. The standard reserve buoyancy is adjustable, from a typical island which is 5.5 lbs per square foot up to 61.5 lbs per cubic foot of island. (Reserve buoyancy is the amount of weight a floating island can support without sinking).

The surface area of a single square foot of island, 8 inches thick, is 198 sq ft. This is provided by the fine fibers which make up the non-woven matrix. Expanded, a 250 sq ft island is the equivalent of 1 acre of actual surface area. Think wetlands and how valuable an acre of wetland is when it’s actual land area! Our islands provide the equivalent without taking up valuable land, and they work in deep or shallow water.

Floating Islands are a concentrated floating wetland – the huge surface area of fibers provides many times more surface area than an equivalent stretch of bare wetland. Surface area is the key factor for microbial activity to take place, and microbes (bacteria) are the key to removing contaminants from the water. Plants and their roots are also important, but more for the extra surface area the roots provide than for any nutrient uptake the plants themselves account for.

The surface area is important because microbes in the water need a surface to proliferate on. Think of a bottle you throw into the water – it doesn’t take long before it’s covered in green slime! This is biofilm and biofilm is made up of microbes, single cell organisms that need nitrogen and phosphorus to thrive. These nutrients, which arrive in the water column via fertilizers, are harmful to water as they allow algae to grow; but if we give microbes somewhere to live, they’ll use the nutrients for their own growth before algae get to them. Thus the microbes keep the water clear of algae, and in so doing prevent algae depleting the water of oxygen. 

Floating islands can be launched into any waterway, be it pond, lake, stream, effluent pond, lagoon, embayment - any waterway will benefit from a floating island. They are usually anchored or tethered in place, though they can be left to float around freely.

Floating Islandes were inspired by Nature, in particular, by the floating peat bogs of Northern Wisconsin, which are associated with clean water and great fishing. Using Nature to cleanse Nature is a form of Biomimetics.

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Floating Islands were developed by Bruce Kania, founder of Floating Island International, and his team in Shepherd, Montana.  Bruce describes the science behind the technology as follows: