Green Options

About one thousand miles off the coast of California, in an isolated area of the north Pacific ocean known as the North Pacific Gyre, a slowly rotating whirlpool of water swirls in a giant clockwise spiral. At the center of the swirling mass of water sits a relatively still center, inviting the accumulation of whatever debris swirls into it.

Created by a high pressure system of trade and westerly winds, all the oceans of the world have massive, slow-moving gyres. While oceans across the globe have accumulated debris, the north Pacific Gyre is known to have amassed at its core the largest. This giant debris field, commonly known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, is estimated to be as large as the state of Texas (some sources say twice the size of Texas).

Scientists and researchers from the Scripps Institute of Oceanography have begun new research on the nature and origin of the Great Pacific Patch, as well as its effect on the local ecosystem and global food chain.

It’s one thing to be appalled by the monstrous accumulation of millions of square miles of plastic waste spinning slowly in the North Pacific gyre. It’s another thing entirely to build an ocean-going vessel out of plastic waste and set out across the sea to call attention to the environmental catastrophe.

That’s exactly what two men, one from California and one from Hawaii, are now doing. The two — Marcus Eriksen, a Ph.D., Gulf War vet and director of research and education for the Long Beach-based Algalita Marine Research Foundation, and Joel Paschal, a former businessman in Hawaii and a one-time employee of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) — are sailing across the Pacific in a homemade vessel, Kon Tiki-style, to “raise awareness about plastic fouling our oceans.”

Where does much of the world’s plastic trash end up? It ends up in a floating, Pacific gyre of “garbage soup” that’s now twice as large as the continental U.S. If the image of the jellyfish [...]