Adjacent Field brings together species including mosses, succulents, blackberry, common chickweed, geranium, ivy, scutch grass and wild sage, which grow up through the pavement, through cracks in buildings or on disused patches of land.

When the team arrived at Deghele, we could not alight from the boat as there was no jetty. Three persons from Deghele helped to evacuate the journalist and his fixer from the speedboat with the help of a canoe.

Another Gladstone neighbour said she met with the company two years ago because trucks were driving up onto her lawn, where her children otherwise play. She said the company put up barriers at the time and told her the trucks would be rerouted to the north. “We’re two years later, they hit the barriers … I’m very upset,” she said with evident emotion. “It’s still not done. I have children, it’s not OK.”

Favorite aspect of what you do: “Everything. I love seeing people smile. I love making people happy. And when I see people, not even just out of pain, but out of their stress, or a horrible day, it just makes me so happy.”

The committee found several other violations of NGT orders for preserving any river. Calling it the grossest violation NGT’s earlier orders, the order said, “Thirty six temporary ponds at the bank of the river were constructed with no lining and some of them still contain dirty water.”

There are four other ocean gyres in the world, but scientists believe that the one in the North Pacific contains the most trash—nearly two trillion pieces of plastic, weighing nearly eighty thousand metric tons, according to a study that scientists working with the Ocean Cleanup published in the online journal Scientific Reports last March. The study found that ninety-two per cent of the pieces are large fragments and objects: toothbrushes, bottles, umbrella handles, toy guns, jerricans, laundry baskets. Most problematic, and accounting for half of the plastic mass in the gyre, are what sailors call ghost nets: great tangles of mile-long discarded fishing nets weighing as much as two tons, which can ensnare animals such as seals and sea turtles. Attempting to fish out this drifting morass of trash using conventional methods—vessels, more nets—would be a Sisyphean task.

“The concrete’s going to move relative to a high temperature, so it’ll expand a little yet still provide drainage characteristics,” he says. “They may not have the freeze problems, but saturated concrete and saturated asphalt can be an issue because they soak up the water and can become a problem.”

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In mid-September, Eriksen sent an e-mail blast to a Listserv called Marine Debris, in which he called Slat’s mission “a misdirected activity” that “makes it harder for those working to focus the narrative to prevention.” Eriksen reminded me, by phone, that only one per cent of the plastic entering the ocean is on the surface of the North Pacific gyre. Scientists still don’t know where, exactly, the rest goes. Eriksen explained that it might be on the seafloor, or suspended as nanoplastic, or have washed back onto the shore. A recent study on debris from the 2011 tsunami in Japan found that, of a thousand boats that the wave carried out to sea, only a hundred were estimated still to be offshore, travelling along the currents. “There are natural mechanisms that eject trash rapidly,” he wrote to the Listserv.

“We drink river water contaminated by crude oil and we drink well water because we don’t have a borehole; the borehole project has been abandoned”, says Steven Golly, the youth chairman of Deghele”.

Van Valin says it solves the bulkier-tool problem of accidentally slinging mulch onto emerging perennials or low-hanging branches and can be switched out with a spade head for digging or for spreading compost on the lawn.

In 2000, a joint venture with Japan’s Chisso Corporation (now named JNC) created ES FiberVisions, the world’s leading supplier of polyolefin bicomponent fibers with production facilities in China, Denmark, Japan, Thailand, and the United States.