Brooklyn In-person Casual Meetup

Seasteading is living on environmentally restorative floating islands with some degree of political autonomy.

The term comes from homesteading, which means making a home for oneself in new, uninhabited places. It generally has associations with self-sufficiency and a frontier lifestyle. Seasteading is reminiscent of that idea, but at sea.

The Seasteading Institute is a nonprofit think-tank promoting the creation of floating ocean cities as a revolutionary solution to some of the world’s most pressing problems: rising sea levels, overpopulation, poor governance, and more…

This meetup will be hosted by NYC native Pete Abrams, an engineer designing potential seastead materials using biomimicry.

For the past few years Pete has been playing with scrap plastic, particularly film, bags and any very thin thermoplastic waste byproducts. His obsession is to utilize and divert a portion of the millions of tons of high quality plastic waste from landfills or incinerators into functional structures.

This has led to his "discovery" of Plasticrete, made from multiple layers of once flimsy film and/or bags fused by hot sand into a solid, robust material. The sand has great compressive strength combined with the durability of the plastic. Taking a material that was discarded from a short sighted single use application and using its inherent everlasting properties to make something new and functional: taking a negative and turning it into a positive. “Making shit outta crap”, the motto and driving philosophy behind all of Abrams’ work.

Currently Abrams is continuing to explore this new material, researching it’s archival qualities and techniques for manufacturing. He works from a studio in pre-gentrified Brooklyn and a milk house in the far Western Catskills.