Go Green: Eco-Voyagers Take on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch

And the award for green cause of the year goes to . . . the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. After decades of anonymity, the floating trash pile located midway between California and Hawaii had a breakout 2009—luring news crews, a trio aboard a raft made of junk, a zero-impact rower, and some hipsters from Vice magazine. Oh, and it was featured on Oprah. But most of the coverage (even you, Oprah) failed to ask one rather important question: Now that we know it’s out there, what do we do about it?

“It’s an impossible cleanup job,” says Captain Charles Moore, who first sailed through the Patch in 1997 after a yacht race to Hawaii and has studied the site since. The Patch’s 3.5 million tons of trash and tiny plastic particles extend a hundred feet below the surface. Any cleanup, Moore says, would harm plankton and other small marine life—that is, if we use current disposal methods.

This past summer, a team aboard the schooner Kaisei experimented with ways to capture, clean, and recycle the plastic bits into diesel fuel, with limited success. Another proposal would utilize a giant floating artificial beach to scoop up and filter the junk. But an immediate solution seems unlikely. “Look, I’m all for cleanup,” says David de Rothschild, an NG Emerging Explorer who plans to sail to the Garbage Patch in the Plastiki, a ship made of plastic bottles (read blog dispatches here). “But 70 percent of all marine plastics are at the bottom of the ocean, and we dump eight million tons more into the sea each year. It’s pushing water uphill to try to clean up this mess.” The best way to eliminate oceanic garbage, de Rothschild argues, is to keep it on land: “The Plastiki is about turning something we’re told is a throwaway into a valuable commodity. If people change the way they see plastic, they may stop tossing the stuff.”
 —Text by Ryan Bradley; Illustration by Matthew Hollister

Comments

[Edinburgh Accommodation]

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[truck rental]

This sure is a shame that all this waste is being thrown in the sea, and ever more- produced! Why can't we all just use refill tanks? Oh yeah.. Were too lazy :)

[Phentermine 37.5]

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[Car hire]

I hope that more people will use these products to protect nature!

[Cruise Deals]

Waw... this sure dose sound amazing! I mean- I knew we have a whole lot of garbage thrown in to the sea but 8 tons? My god! What will we have left by the time I will be 80? This is very disturbing! I do hope scientists and environmentalists will find the way to deal with this!

[Beth Terry, aka Fake Plastic Fish]

You ask, what can we do about it? de Rothschild says we need to keep plastics on land. But this is an almost impossible task considering the amount of single use plastics that are produced every day.

The solution is to reduce our consumption of plastics and find plastic-free alternatives. I have been doing just that for the past 2-1/2 years, and in 2009 my plastic consumption was less than 4% of the U.S. average.

My blog, Fake Plastic Fish (http://fakeplasticfish.com) is a resource for finding ways to live with less plastic.

[Tracy]

I am about going green. :) I have heard about Great Pacific Garbage Patch before and I suppose it is one of the ways how to prevent the nature. Great post...

[Miami Hotels]

I know about Great Pacific Garbage Patch from some times. It is really good way to prevent the nature and its components. I am impressed with your article.Thank You for sharing with all people.

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[John B.]

I've known about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch for a few years, but I never noticed people reluctance to show pictures of it. After reading your comment, Kelly, I did a google image search, and I didn't really come up with any shots that really convey the massive amount of garbage that ends up in this accidental landfill (sea fill?). I doubt even an ariel photograph could capture the full 3.5 million tons of trash, but we could do better than showing diagrams of ocean currents, dead animals, and close up shots of floating debris.

[Kelly]

Ashame no one will actually show pictures of this because if you do then its real and people have to deal with it
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