Green Options

Here’s a real shifting baseline. Fishing catches may be decreasing, but inadvertent ocean litter pickups of mostly plastic debris are increasing. Fishermen don’t actually go out looking for plastic debris to pick up. These ocean garbage pick-ups are accidental. For now.

But soon, fishermen may be paid to bring garbage back to port.

Already, ocean garbage levels are damaging fishing catches. Dealing with garbage is now costing fishermen an ever increasing amount of time.

Everyone has read different estimates of the size of the giant plastic trash dump now swirling in the Pacific. The Air France crash added evidence of just how big of a problem ocean litter is becoming when ocean trash was mistaken for crash debris.

Currently several organizations are starting to pick up ocean litter:

Now that Oprah has turned her spotlight on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, that great mass of garbage floating in the ocean has finally caught the public eye.  An upcoming ocean garbage expedition to the patch, dubbed Project Kaisei, should draw even more attention when it launches this summer.  Project Kaisei’s aim is to explore the feasibility of collecting and recycling the garbage patch, which mainly consists of plastics, into diesel fuel.  How feasible is it?  A modest derelict fishing net recycling program in Hawaii provides some tantalizing clues.