WHAT TO DO ABOUT THE PACIFIC GARBAGE PATCH

Recyclers, Scientists Probe Great Pacific Garbage Patch
Colin Sullivan, August 5, 2009 (NY Times)

"Scientists, sailors, journalists and government officials set sail from San Francisco Bay…to study the planet's largest known floating garbage dump, about 1,000 miles north of Hawaii… the so-called Great Pacific Garbage Patch, [to] learn about its mysterious vortex of discarded plastic and assess what might be done about it.

"The venture is no working vacation for environmental advocates. Project Kaisei is at its core a commercial endeavor, funded in part by international recycling companies that see opportunity in a sea of debris thought to be twice the size of Texas…Project Kaisei is backed by [individual donors and] the Bureau of International Recycling, whose membership counts 77 companies from Austria, China, Cuba and Canada…Deutsche Bank AG is also a key funder."

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"Mary Crowley, co-founder of the project, said examining the dump's potential as recycled material is just as important as studying the decomposed and decomposing plastic, which largely originated in California and Japan before being trapped by currents of the North Pacific Gyre…The alliance between a group of activists who want to see the trash heap cleared and the corporate recycling world is no accident. Doug Woodring, a technology entrepreneur and former Merrill Lynch financier turned co-founder of Project Kaisei, said the marriage of commercial interests and environmental is key to the research mission's success…

"A second ship launched from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego…funded by a $600,000 grant from the University of California…Both vessels intend to produce hard data and an eventual white paper on what is still a largely unexplored phenomenon…[They] will look at how decomposing plastic over the last few decades has mixed with phytoplankton and zooplankton and whether netting techniques might be used to clean it up…[M]uch of the plastic has already broken down in a soupy mix that tends to move around as ocean currents and storms produce swells and wind…"

From hethmq via YouTube

"Cleaning up the bigger piles of trash, which float in random clumps over long distances above and beneath the surface, is possible but may not solve the core issue. And…would be expensive… [T]he focus may have to turn to clearing only the more recent accumulation, in the last three or four years, rather than the last 30…[T]he challenge is daunting. According to a 2006 report…every pound of plankton in the central Pacific Ocean is offset by about 6 pounds of litter…[E]very square mile of ocean is home to nearly 50,000 pieces of litter, much of which tends to harm or kill wildlife…

"…[U]ncertainty about the scope of the problem is precisely what is driving the voyage and the subsequent white paper…[M]aking the cleanup into an economic, rather than just a moral, argument is essential to moving forward to actual commercial activity…[T]he project has booked two documentary filmmakers who will be shooting footage over the next month…[T]he project could result in initial cleanup operations within the next year…"