It’s a chunk of Styrofoam the size of a 55-gallon drum. We can’t say whether it’s debris from the tsunami event last year, but it is the biggest thing we’ve found. There’s nothing written or stamped on it, or anything identifying where it came from. It’s just a massive chunk of polystyrene foam rolling across the seas.

With everything back on deck we haul in the Hi-speed trawl. Like we suspected, there are a few dozen particles of plastic ranging from the size of a pea to a grain of sand. This is the edge of the garbage patch. It’s not an island, nor is it easily visible, except for the random bottle, like the detergent bottle we found this morning. It’s mostly microplastic particles showing up endlessly in our nets, each the size of fish food, in every gyre, in every ocean, and also here.

Another Report:

Greetings from 21N,155E, where it's hot and seas are calm, as expected.  We made two debris sightings yesterday, which we collected.

5-11-12   Time 11:15    19.56N, 155.04E     Small, green detergent bottle, approx. 20cm tall.  Heavily fouled by marine life.  Very degraded on the surface.

5-11-12   Time 17:15    20.31N, 155.11E     Large foamed polystyrene cylinder, approximately 1 meter tall, almost the size of a 55 gallon drum.  There was almost no fouling on this debris, perhaps because it is an unstable substrate, moving and rolling across the sea surface.  Only 3 juvenille barnacles on it.   Looked to be relatively clean and new.  Typically foamed polystyrene degrades quickly at sea, becoming rounded on the edges first.  This is not the case here.

Just for clarification, we did NOT catch a 25-FOOT Wahoo, we caught a 25 POUND Wahoo. It was about 2.5 feet long, still pretty impressive and very delicious. But definitely NOT 25 feet long. We just got some good laughs out of my mistake.

So we are about 1100 nautical miles from Marshall Islands and we are starting to see larger fragments of plastic floating by the boat. Crew members are following the NOAA protocol to log large debris by two people watching from the front of the boat and logging all fragments spotted for 50 straight minutes. We also log all fragments spotted during the day. This morning alone we spotted about 10 pieces (over three hours) of plastic ranging from 2-10 inches. Most of the plastic is white, which makes sense because most colored plastic would turn white after sitting in the sun for months to years.

As we approach the accumulation zone, we expect these numbers to increase and the Manta Trawl samples to increase in plastic pollution density.

Things are getting much more interesting as we chase down the eye of the gyre. 

We are about to launch the first manta trawl at 4PM today. This will be the beginning of our official research. The plan is to put the manta out every 50 nautical miles, as long as weather continues to be appropriate. In total, we will probably collected 25 to 35 manta trawl samples, along with a similar amount of hi-speed trawl samples. In addition to the research beginning today, Shanley and I are leading sit-up sessions during the 60 minutes that the trawl is out. Sea Dragon is slowed down to less than 3 nautical miles during this time – perfect time to get a little exercise in.

“It’s a tuna…no…a Wahoo,” Shanlee says with excitement.  She’s recently finished her yachtmaster course, and loves anything “sailing”.  Hank is our resident marine biologist with a keen interest in the biodiversity of colonizing creatures on plastic pollution.  If we come across some large debris, he’ll be diving under and around it with his wire cutters snipping of pieces of encrusted plastic.  Now he’s hauling in lunch.

The Wahoo flies into the air, then back to water, slapping the surface as the hook and line pull it against its will.  It submits quickly, which makes us think it may have been on the line a while and tired out.  Soon it’s on deck and Hank gives it a quick cut to stop its suffering.  We’re interested to see what’s in the stomach.

This fish is beautiful, with silvery-blue stripes and blotches down its back, black spines in it’s sail, large black pupils surrounded by deep blue, and triangular teeth in a long sharp row from the tip of its beak to deep in its mouth.  Hank opens the belly to remove the stomach and place it on a cutting board.

There’s not much inside: two spherical lenses remaining from digested eyeballs, the spine of a smaller fish, and two lime-size parasitic worms latched onto the inside walls of the gut.  They are filled with brown pre-digested blood.  Alex is in sheer disgust/joy at squeezing one of them to remove its gut contents to see what’s inside.

Nothing, but good news.  There’s no plastic here.  Hank filets the remainder of the fish, which we’ll feed 14 crew today.

(Editor's Note: The 5 Gyres Expedition is currently just one day out of the Marshall Islands, and I just received Executive Director, Marcus Eriksen's first blog from the trip, so we're posting now. Godspeed to Sea Dragon and all the crew, we're rooting for you. It's our goal on this expedition to share our findings and work as widely as possible so please tweet and facebook the posts you like)

We've just arrived on Majuro Atoll in the Marshall Islands. As the jumbo jet turned to make a landing, I could see the thin ring of the atoll from the plane window.  Within a few minutes we were on the ground, then headed to the Sea Dragon, sitting calmly in the center of the Atoll.   A crew of 14 is aboard the Sea Dragon, and is ready to go, but we need one full day to provision the boat and get through customs. With hours to spare, we wander the island.

We take a boat to one of the many islands around the rim of this ancient volcano.  From above, the island looks like a cup, with the northern islands completely submerged.  We find one isolated island to the east and wander around.  On the outside, or ocean-side, we find the same plastic pollution washed ashore; flip flops, bottles, bucket and crate pieces, bottle caps, and thousands of degraded fragments.  On the inside of the atoll we find amazing lagoons filled with life. I hover over one giant head of coral (named Porites)  that's larger than my Ford van back home.  On a sandy plain I find burrows in the sand where shrimp and fish share the same tunnel, one protecting while the other digs.  This world is amazing, unlimited discovery, a beautiful panorama of light, life and color, and all the reason why protecting the ocean is in our own self-interest.

We're just hours away from departing now.  By tomorrow this time we should be 100 miles away from here, closer to Tokyo, on our way to the Western Garbage Patch of the North Pacific Gyre.  Stay tuned for more.

April 25th.  “It’s 92 degrees,” the captain says from the cockpit before we land.  I can see the slums beside the runway, with children running and waving, as if they can catch us.  We are going there as soon as we land. 

Rakesh, a guide with Reality Tours, meets us at the bridge that goes over the train tracks and into Dharavi, a slum community build on reclaimed landfill 170 years ago, with 540,000 people per square kilometer and now boasts of being the industrial center where $2/day labor beats any other market in the world.  Mumbai is one of the major recipients of plastic waste from the US and Europe, and Dharavi is where a poor and eager workforce doesn’t complain.  Through a maze of narrow alleys and raw sewage channels, we enter the plastic smelting zone, but we smell it first. 

Giant sacks, piled two stories high, are filled with everything plastic, from washing machine parts, to bottle caps and Barbie dolls.  There are thousands of them. In damp and dark rooms, men and women squat on piles of mixed plastic and sort it all by hand into separate types.  “It’s the feel and smell of it that makes them know what it is,” Rakesh explains.  The ear-piercing crush of plastic into penny-size fragments happens in rooms where men stuff larger pieces into giant funnels with rotating blades attached to heavy flywheels. 

We meander between sacks of sorted plastic to a place where the rooftop is billowing black smoke.  My eyes begin to sting.  “Here is where they melt it,” Rakesh explains, adding,  “…and they sleep and eat here because the owner, who only comes into the slum once a month, likes the free security.  They don’t leave very often.”  Inside the long dark room there’s one man on one end pouring shredded HDPE into a hopper, which is then melted inside what looks like a red-hot cannon.  On the other end the plastic and extruded like spaghetti, cooled in a bath of water, and then chopped into tiny pellets.  Peering into the hopper, over the melting cannon, beside the man operating the front end of the machine, my throat begins to tighten.  A minute later I can feel a headache coming on.  The two men in this room are seemingly unaffected, busily going about their work, ignoring our intrusion.  They are shirtless, wearing sandals, covered with tiny bits of plastic and soot, and as Rakesh explains, they will not live past 55.  They are the men that turn the plastic that waste pickers collect for 15 Rupees/kg ($.30) into plastic worth 40 Rupees/kg ($.90) in exchange for $2/day minus 20 years.

This plastic gets another life as a lesser-quality plastic product, which keeps it out of the ocean.  But would it happen if labor and worker conditions were a real cost?  I don’t think so.  Would average Americans demand accountability if they saw the kids in Dharavi living in their waste?  I’m certain they would.  The challenge is to close the loop on our material consumption with health, human rights and conservation the biggest part of the equation. 

“They are workers from Bangladesh building our roads,” he replied, adding, “and you know, here in Chennai they mix plastic waste into the asphalt?” He knows I’m here to lecture about ocean plastic.  New roads around India are shredding and mixing plastic waste into the tar, sand and gravel to build new roads, which they argue are more resistant to weathering.  Asphaltindia.com has more business than it can handle.  

India is awash with plastic waste, as we’ve observed in every city and along the roads between them.  We walked along the beach in Chennai, while plastic wrappers and bags tumbled by our feet.  What occurs to me is that the litter problem is the same in India as it is in much of the world.  What India lacks is an effective waste management system, as well as methods to manage product development that designs for recovery and recyclability.  Much of this plastic could be easily recovered by hand, machine, or passively by rain or wind.  There’s a “SYSTEMS” problem that is a great as the litter and design problems.   Smarter designed products, better litter education, and efficient systems of waste management, will go a long way to end the plague of plastic pollution.

I found my way to the Old Delhi train station for the evening train to Ramnagar 250km to the north.  Well over a thousand people crowded the platform to rush the long blue train slowly coming to a screechy stop.  Another thousand poured out, and at least one cow that I could see.  I took a window seat.

As the train rolled out I instantly saw what defines the plastic pollution challenge in developing nations. In the first quarter-mile I could not see the grass/soil/water beneath a sea of plastic bags. As India races to the global stage, 300 million of its 1.2 billion population lives below the poverty line.  Recycling only happens here if it has an immediate benefit to one’s livelihood. Although India boasts a 47% recovery rate for plastic waste, dirty plastic bags are too wasteful to value. 

In the 5-hour train ride, I watched an unending trail of plastic, waxing and waning as we passed small villages, but never was the ground near the tracks plastic free.  In the weeks ahead we will focus on solutions, listening first to the real challenges people face here.  Stay tuned for more.

Name: Paul Sharp

Age: 37

City/Country of origin: Perth, Western Australia

Website: twohandsproject.org

Twitter: @2handsproject

1.)  When and why did you get interested in the issue of marine plastic pollution?

I’ve beach combed since I was a kid, plastic pollution has interested me since the late 1990’s, though back then I thought of it as “litter” or “marine debris”. I was disturbed by the increase of plastic on my local beaches, but believed it was a behavioral issue, that could be solved if people didn’t litter.  It was only after working with Manly’s Eco Divers, removing tons of plastic from Sydney Harbor , and returning to rescuing marine life  that I really made the connection that plastic is pollution.

2.) What prompted you to participate in the 2012 5 Gyres Western Garbage Patch/Tsunami Debris Expedition?

Jeanne from Algalita told me about the voyage, having worked so much on activating people on the issue of plastic pollution how could I not join the expedition!?

3.)  What are your personal and professional goals you hope to achieve by participating in the voyage?

Personally I’m looking forward to discovering whether I’m cut out for ocean passages.. I’ve always been attracted to the idea of cruise sailing. I’m excited to be meeting the guys from Algalita and 5 Gyres as well as all the other crew members, hoping to form some great friendships that will make us all more effective in tackling plastic pollution.  Being on this voyage will improve my ability to communicate on this issue, I am often asked about the Pacific Gyre, or the Tsunami debris, though my current experience is limited to coastal and river plastic pollution. It will be great to learn the methods used in collecting samples so we can send you some useable data from Australia.

4.)  What are your concerns, reservations, fears about spending a nearly a month at sea?  Have you ever been to sea, if so, how long?

It would really suck to be badly seasick! I’m concerned about possible navigational hazards.. particularly larger pieces of Tsunami debris. My father’s yacht was sunk by a shipping container. My experience at sea is limited to no more than a few days out.

5.) What environmental quote do you most identify with to guide your path as a steward of the ocean?

That’s a hard one.. Let me think about it…

Name:  Mandy Barker

Age:   48

Occupation:  Photographer

City/Country of origin:  Leeds, England, UK

Website:   http://mandy-barker.com

1.) When and why did you get interested in the issue of marine plastic pollution?

A few years ago when I first read about the disturbing state of our oceans I felt it
was something I could not turn away from and had to do something about.

2.) What prompted you to participate in the 2012 5 Gyres Western Garbage Patch/Tsunami Debris Expedition?

A single-minded determination to follow a passion to increase the awareness of oceanic plastic debris to a wider audience. Taking part in the voyage and having the opportunity to work alongside scientists will not only generate a deeper understanding of the detrimental effect of plastic on marine life but will create a solid foundation to progress and expand my work at primary source.

3.) What are your personal and professional goals you hope to achieve by participating in the voyage?

Personal goals are to be part of the team of like-minded people sharing crew experiences. To see for myself what exists in the Pacific and to overcome a certain fear of the sea.

Professional goal is to be able to take away from this unique experience the power and knowledge to move people to act, or at the very least for them to take notice of the issue of marine plastic debris.

4.) What are your concerns, reservations, fears about spending a nearly a month at sea?  Have you ever been to sea, if so, how long?

I have never stepped foot on a yacht before and have only been to sea via ferry crossing or small fishing boat off the coast of the UK. At the age of 12 I was swept out to sea from a beach in the UK and nearly drowned, so I have always been mindful of the power of the sea. I have not really given any thought to my lack of sailing experience as my purpose and intentions have driven me and will, I hope, more than compensate for the occassional ‘rough’ day.

5.) What environmental quote do you most identify with to guide your path as a steward of the ocean?

The quote I have chosen is within an art context, but is applicable to my environmental intention of trying to make people aware of problems that exist through visual interpretation.

“Art is not what you see but what you make others see” (Edward Degas)

I hope the opportunity of this voyage will reveal some of the unknown and my resulting work will be able to be viewed by those who lack the experience of seeing it.

 

(Editor's Note: In the lead up to the United Nations Rio + 20 Earth Summit in Brazil this join, 5 Gyres has worked with The National Resource Defense Council and a host of other stakeholder groups to create and declare the following Global Call To Action. Special thanks to Leila Monroe at NRDC for her work on drafting this document) 

Whereas, for the past 60 years, plastics production and use has dramatically increased; the vast majority of plastic generated is not recovered at the end of its useful life.[i]

Whereas, due to the lightweight character of many disposable plastics, they easily enter the environment by natural forces, such as wind. 

Whereas, plastic is a useful material with myriad applications, but a non-renewable material that requires careful lifecycle management so that it does not degrade land, oceans, human health, and sustainable economies.

Whereas, between 60 and 80% of marine debris is derived from plastic products and enormous quantities of plastic are concentrated in the 5 largest gyres of our oceans, with known serious consequences for marine life and possible grave consequences for the food chain and human health.[ii] 

Whereas, UNEP’s 2011 Year Book identified ocean plastic pollution as "persistent, bioaccumulating and toxic substances", stating that: "Research indicates that tiny pieces of plastic are absorbing and concentrating from the seawater and sediments chemicals, from polychlorinated biphenols, PCBs, to the pesticide DDT. [...] Many of these pollutants, including PCBs, cause chronic health effects such as endocrine disruption, mutagenicity and carcinogenicity."[iii]

Whereas, Plastic debris causes substantial economic impacts to coastal economies because of the high costs of removal and disposal, but cleaning this waste from watersheds, coastlines, and the nearshore seafloor is critical to prevent flooding, navigational hazards, detriment to the tourism industry, and ecological destruction.[iv]

Whereas, The Honolulu Strategy adopted at the Third Intergovernmental Review Meeting on the Implementation Global Programme of Action for the Protection of the Marine Environment form Land-Based Activities identified a priority goal of “Reduced amount and impact of land-based litter and solid waste introduced into the marine environment,” and noted that the Honolulu Strategy is a companion document to global, regional and national processes to address plastic waste source reduction.

Whereas, UNEP has called for use of instruments such as fees, fines, penalties, liability and compensation schemes, subsidies and incentives to address marine plastic pollution, which it describes as “one of the world’s most pervasive pollution problems impacting our oceans and waterways.” [v]

Whereas, the Scientific and Technical Advisory Panel of the Global Environment Facility and UNEP identified the need for prioritization of solutions that address the root cause of plastic pollution “production and consumption patterns, including the design and marketing of products internationally without appropriate consideration for their environmental persistence or ability to be recycled in the locations where sold.”[vi]

Wheareas, more than 100 presidents and prime ministers and thousands of other world leaders will gather in Rio de Janiero  Brazil in  June 2012 for the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20 Earth Summit) and will be taking action to speed the transition to a green economy and sustainable future.

Whereas, the impacts of plastic pollution and the unsustainable production and consumption patterns that are the underlying causes of this problem must be addressed in the transition to a green economy and sustainable future.

We -- countries, corporations, communities or civil society groups -- hereby commit to contribute to the goal of ending plastic pollution within the next decade.

Specifically, in accordance with the precautionary principle, we will immediately develop, publicize, and support specific time-bound measureable commitments to reduce plastic pollution.  Such commitments could include regulatory controls, market incentives, extended producer responsibility policies for single-use plastics, collection and recycling infrastructure, and efforts to change to individual consumption habits, to achieve specific source reduction targets aimed at decreasing the production of plastic materials (especially single-use items) most likely to end up as plastic pollution in our ocean, rivers, and on land.

We further agree to submit these commitments to the Rio+20 compendium (www.uncsd2012.org/rio20/makeacommitment.html), and to be held accountable for their  implementation.

[i] UNEP Year Book: Emerging Issues in our Global Environment, 2011 at 22, http://www.unep.org/yearbook/2011/; U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Municipal Solid Waste Generation, Recycling, and Disposal in the United States: Tables and Figures for 2010, December, 2011, available at http://www.epa.gov/osw/nonhaz/municipal/pubs/2010_MSW_Tables_and_Figures_508.pdf.

[ii] California Ocean Science Trust & California Ocean Protection Council, Plastic Debris in the California Marine Ecosystem.  A summary of the Current Research, Solution Efforts and Data Gaps. Sept. 2011. Page 1. Available at: http://calost.org/pdf/science-initiatives/marine%20debris/Plastic%20Report_10-4-11.pdf.

[iii]  UNEP Year Book: Emerging Issues in our Global Environment, 2011, http://www.unep.org/yearbook/2011/.

[iv] Plastic Debris in the California Marine Ecosystem at 31.

[v] Report prepared for the United Nations Environment Programme, Ten Brink, P., Lutchman, I., Bassi, S., Speck, S., Sheavly, S., Register, K., and Woolaway, C., 2009. Guidelines on the Use of Market-based Instruments to Address the Problem of Marine Litter. Institute for European Environmental Policy (IEEP), Brussels, Belgium, and Sheavly Consultants, Virginia Beach, Virginia, USA. 60 pp. available at, http://www.unep.org/regionalseas/marinelitter/publications/docs/Economic_Instruments_and_Marine_Litter.pdf.

[vi] STAP(2011). Marine Debris as a Global Environmental Problem: Introducing a solutions based framework focused on plastic, A STAP Information Document. Global Environment Facility, Washington, DC, available at, http://www.thegef.org/gef/sites/thegef.org/files/publication/STAP%20MarineDebris%20-%20website.pdf.

See, I was raised in Oregon surrounded by astounding natural beauty and plenty of rain. My parents took me hiking and camping in the Northwest since before I can remember. I loved the trees, not because they played a key role in the ecosystem, but because they were great to climb. I swam in the lakes, chased squirrels and associated being outside with having fun. But liking nature as a kid doesn’t directly translate to being an environmentalist.

While most kids dreamt of flying, I’d always dreamed of breathing underwater. Maybe my parents showed me too many national geographic videos about the oceans, but I was hooked. I especially loved sea turtles – the way they moved through the water, the designs on their shells. In fact everything was sea-themed for a few years (and I mean everything – imagine a full size mural on my bedroom wall). My perfect underwater world idyll was shattered when my 6thgrade science teacher showed us a photo of a sea turtle with a tumor on its eye as a result of human pollution in the oceans. I was horrified and thought to myself (perhaps a bit naively), “I have to stop people from hurting the sea turtles and polluting the oceans!” Thanks to one scary image, I switched from appreciation to action, from an ocean fanatic to a budding environmentalist.

 

After that, I learned as much as I could about oceans, including other problems such as coral reef bleaching and plastic waste. I got certified as a scuba diver and fulfilled my childhood fantasy of breathing underwater. I went to science camps and memorized the words of the Lorax, “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.” I wanted to be that “someone.”

But life intervened. I didn’t live near the ocean, so the rest of middle school and high school passed, and I became interested in other social and political issues. Senior year I traveled to the coast of Wales for two years of school, and there I joined a marine environmental service group, became enchanted with the sea again, and recommitted to protecting our oceans. I attended climate change conferences and decided that it was my job to speak up for trees and fish because without us, they have no voice. I want future generations to marvel at the splendor of our natural world, and not just by watching Planet Earth on BBC.

So now, as an Environmental Studies and International Relations major, my transformation into an environmentalist is nearly complete. What I will do now is take more action, influence others, share my thoughts with you, and maybe start wearing more fair-trade organic cotton shirts, but I won’t be sprouting dreadlocks anytime soon.

(Clare Thomas is a textile and environmental artist studying for an MA in Art & Environment at University College Falmouth in Cornwall, England. She blogs about cleaning beaches here. Do you have a story about how you're being the SEA CHANGE? Tell us about it: stiv@5gyres.org)

When I tell people I'm studying for an MA in Art and Environment, they nearly always ask, "What does that mean?" Or, "What do you actually do, then?" I explain that my work is concerned with plastic ocean pollution and I clean plastic and other debris off local beaches.  The next question is always, "And do you make anything with the plastic you find?"

Not really, is the short answer.  But as in so much of life, the short answer doesn't really tell the whole story .......

I started cleaning beaches by accident. One day at my favourite beach, I found something I couldn't identify. It took me a while to determine that it was man-made, probably a bit of worn and battered fishing net. Looking around, I realised that the beach was home to all sorts of rubbish. Even though it's quite isolated, my beautiful beach was a veritable dumping ground for litter and ocean debris. So I picked it up.

Thus began my new career as beach cleaner. Over the past year or so, this “career” has slowly become the focus of my MA. To begin with, I didn't really consider beach cleaning to be art. I was very much stuck in the idea that art is done by lonely artists who keep their work close to their chest until it gets shown in an exhibition. Art was something you made, with stuff, and I felt I should be doing something with all this plastic. But the stuff I was picking up was - and still is - pretty yucky. Most of the plastic that gets washed up on my local beaches seems to end up in the seaweed along the wrack line: it's messy and smelly when I pull it out.

In my studio, I tried to focus on the bright, colourful plastic, the stuff that other artists use to make collages. For a while I even convinced myself that it was treasure, a modern version of the ancient treasure hoards that metal detectorists find in British fields.  The first thing I made was a knitted child's swimsuit, from a 1930's knitting pattern. It had shells going all around it and I added a few pieces of ocean debris on the back. It had a sense of nostalgia to it because of the style, and also a sadness - the rubbish represented the metaphorical weight of all the plastic in the ocean on my back as I swam in the sea.

My next piece was a sun dress lined with plastic bottle fragments from the beach. This stayed hidden away until December when I included it in a group show. It is an uncomfortable dress; it would hurt to wear. When I made it I was thinking of all the plastic that stays hidden from view but is still in the ocean, even if we can't see it. It is, as someone pointed out to me, my hair shirt.

These two pieces are a pretty good representation of my state of mind as I cleaned beaches on my own. They say a lot about how hopeless, and angry, and lonely I felt. Yet, almost without knowing it, I was beginning to collaborate with others and share what I was doing. In January 2011, I performed in a shadow play, which involved improvising with light and water in front of a screen in order to cast shadows that are viewed by an audience. It was both a performance and a very private and meditative experience, and it reminded me that sharing a personal experience with others creates a new, and potentially more powerful, experience for all.

I also began posting snippets from my beach cleaning on Facebook and persuading friends and family to join me, bags in hand, on the beach. So when, Jan Nowell, another MA student, suggested working together I agreed – but a part of me wanted to run back to my lovely studio, just me and my stuff. So we established some ground rules for communication: Collaboration is a very productive form of working - so long as everyone is on the same page.

Turns out that Jan and I work very well together. We spent most of last summer working in an experimental way, a kind of learning by doing: go to a beach, clean it up, process and record the finds, make a note of what we've learned, repeat. We began to see variations in the types of debris we found on different beaches and wondered about how much these are influenced by tides and currents. Friends and fellow artists got involved. Along the way we've met all sorts of people, and had a lot of fun: making rubbish kebabs, talking to people on the ferry, and investigating the beach using quadrats - you can read all about it on my blog.

Working this way made me see that I can open up my work to include others. Sometimes just a few of us working informally and spontaneously, and sometimes by inviting people to a specific event.  Working together makes the job of cleaning beaches much lighter. And the act itself becomes a space in which art occurs. It occurs in the work of transforming a beach, (however temporary that transformation may be,) and in the conversations we have had with passers-by and on the ferry. It occurs in the investigations made on beaches within quadrat squares and the unexpected participation of strangers.

You can think of it as a performance, or a dance, perhaps. Not so different from improvising  in a shadow play - none of us knows quite what will happen next but the very act of working and talking together deepens the experience for all involved. In this context art is not so much about ownership, not an object you make or possess, but an action you share with others. It is a gift.

I still clean beaches on my own, especially Arthur's Beach, my favourite beach, where this journey began. Sometimes I talk to people I meet and tell them what I'm doing. But, to be honest, it's Jan who has the knack for conversations. I share through my blog, and through the connections I've made on Facebook with people all over the world who also clean beaches, and streets, and parks. They are very special people. I'm hoping those connections will lead to more collaborations, and more art, in the future.

(Editor's Note: Thanks to Niki Woodward, 5 Gyres supporter and change agent in Santa Cruz for submitting this story. It was this photo, taken by Niki, and the subsequent conversations that followed that gave birth to the 5 Gyres, BE THE SEA CHANGE campaign. If you'd like to share your story to be featured on the 5 Gyres blog, we'd love to hear from you. Send me an email: stiv@5gyres.org)

My mother came to visit me in Santa Cruz a few weekends ago and thankfully, it happened to be a nice weekend. She lives in Logan, Utah, a small college town about 1.5 hours northeast of Salt Lake City, where she normally runs on snow, instead of sand. One morning during her visit she decided not to go for a morning run and instead, we went for a walk on the beach.  It was a gorgeous "winter" day, especially by her standards. The sun was shining, the birds were singing and the waves crashed against the beach. 

I admit that I take for granted how beautiful this little beach town really is; how the morning breeze smells as it blows gently on my cheeks, how awe-inspiring the bubbly ripples are as the tide ebbs and flows, and how many sand grains there really are these beaches and all along the California coast. 

My mom had to remind me, on more than one occasion, how lucky I am to spend my days living with such breathtaking views. Sadly, my eyes were not concentrated on the 'breathtaking view' and she could tell. My mind wasn't set a wonder by the infinity of sand grains below my feet,, the swirling tidal ripples, the cool wave spray glistening in the morning light...No, my focus was fixated elsewhere: the yellow soda bottle caps, the gently used red plastic straws, the shredded blue single use plastic bags, the crusty white plastic sporks. I found myself taking pictures of the plastic pollution that was evenly littered along the high tide line, while my mom enjoyed the extraordinary sights and sounds. 

After picking up one piece of discarded plastic fragment at a time, I made a collage of photos, with a picture of a beach walk tile in the center... "Be the sea change you wish to see". How appropriate... a clever spin on one of my favorite quotes by Mahatma Gandhi. It was then that I stopped, and looked out at the sea... How sad that the "little things" can easily distract me from the big beautiful beach, the big waves and the big picture... 

I looked at the high tide line and than back out at the ocean, where one day the little plastic pieces may soon end up... and I reaffirmed my commitment to being the "sea change" I hope to be for myself, for those that live in the sea and for future generations to be able to enjoy the beauty of the sea. Here is to more beach cleanups, my cache of reusable canvas bags, my stainless steel water bottle, bulk goods filled mason jars, straw-less beverages.... and the many more beautiful beach days!

Last year, Patagonia Surf Ambassador Mary Osborne sailed with us across the Southern Atlantic Gyre.  Since, Mary has become champion of the marine plastic issue, having learned the issue at sea with or team. Recently, she caught up with 5 Gyres cofounders, Marcus Eriksen and Anna Cummins, and produced this short film about plastics in the ocean. Thanks to Patagonia, Mary Osborne, and Justin Bastien for creating this piece.

(Drawing Will Take Place April 7th)

For just $50, you can enter to win a coveted spot onboard the Algalita/5 Gyres sailing expedition to the Western Pacific Garbage Patch. The voyage departs from Majuro in the Marshall Islands on May 1st, 2012 and arrives in Tokyo on May 23rd, 2012. Organized by 5 Gyres Institute and Algalita, this trip represents a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be part of the most comprehensive study ever done in the region.

Each $50 donation gives you the chance to be an active member of the crew on an all-inclusive, 3-week voyage aboard the 72-foot Sea Dragon, operated by Pangaea Exploration. (There are still a few spots available for purchase at $9500 per person.) The winner of this drawing will work with scientists and educators onboard, helping them sample the ocean surface to determine the density of marine plastic pollution across the gyre. You’ll also assist our two professional captains in the sailing and day-to-day operations of the ship. Marcus Eriksen, co-founder of 5 Gyres and a leading expert in the field will lead the expedition.

The Western Pacific Garbage Patch is a rarely studied frontier for scientists to learn about plastic pollution in our ocean, and limited data has been published to date. Along this route, it’s also entirely possible you will encounter marine debris generated by the Japan Tsunami of March 2011.

There is no limit to how many tickets may be purchased per person. All proceeds from this opportunity drawing and ticket sales go DIRECTLY to underwriting the cost of the voyage, collecting samples for laboratory analysis, and helping scientists gain a better understanding of the extent of plastic pollution in our oceans. To enter, go here.

**Air travel, meals, and lodging to and from embarking points and ports of call are not provided. Participants must be healthy, 18 years of age of order, and able to physically deal with conditions of oceanic sailing. Upon completion of the drawing, winner will be contacted directly. No cash prize will be awarded in the event that the winner may not be able to participate, but the winner may transfer his or her winning ticket to a person of their choosing, provided details of the substitute participant are confirmed within one week after winner is announced. If the winner fails to provide a substitute crew member, the contest organizers reserve the right to select a suitable crew nominee, subject to approval by the winner.

"One of the greatest problems faced by any marine species is the sheer amount of plastic in the ocean, especially plastic bags, as has been highlighted by the Daily Mail’s campaign against the profligate use of them. Dr Ruth Leeney notes in a book I co-edited, Dominion: A Whale Symposium, these bags don’t biodegrade. They break down into smaller fragments that enter the food chain — and eventually the whales’ bodies. â€˜It is ironic that a plastic shopping bag, with so short a lifespan in a person’s existence, can have a powerfully negative impact elsewhere, by causing unnecessary death’, says Dr Leeney. As my fellow editor, artist Angela Cockayne notes, a minke whale recently stranded itself on the French coast. Its stomach was clogged with 800kg of plastic, including British supermarket bags."

What's at issue this: how do we put a quantitative value on the healthy populations of species such as whales in terms of negative impacts that plastic bags cause? How do we quantify the fact that marine born plastic bags absorb dangerous chemicals that the chemical industry releases into the environment, concentrate it, and gets into the food chain? It's a tough one, for sure.

Here's a solution:  Be like Emily Utter and look beyond the way The Save The Bag Coalition frames the debate. Educate yourself on the true costs of plastics, including plastic bags on the environment and when you're testifying in front of your city council and hearing the rhetoric that The Save The Bag Coalition regurgitates, counter them with the story of a Sperm Whale. Counter with all the questions above.  The truth will only come to light if YOU be the vehicle for truth--justice, including environmental justice, is won by a grassroots constituency organizing and arming themselves with bullet proof facts.  Emily and I are here to help.  

(Editor's Note:  The following essay and work was submitted to 5 Gyres by UK artist and activist, Robyn Woolston. As part of our Be The Sea Change series about our supporters initiatives to fight plastic pollution, we're delighted to have Robyn's submission. You can check out more of her work, see links to TEDx talks and such here. Would you like to share your story? Send an email to me, stiv@5gyres.org) 

What is a Smart Price?

I was born in the ‘middle’ as far away as one can get from the ocean. Literally in the Mid-‘lands’ of England. From that day on it felt like I longed for the sea, to return to what 55-78% of my body is composed of. That being water.

I’ve subsequently lived on the South West & now the North West coast and when I heard about the North Pacific gyre I wept. My cells grieved for the largest eco-system in the world and the state that had befallen its magnificence.

Its polluted condition symbolises a powerful disconnect; a fragmentation of our innate and profound correlation with the Earth and therefore one-another. Implicit in this dis-ease is the reality that we cannot ‘see’ the mess we are amassing out ‘there’ beyond the horizon, and therefore are visually and literally set apart from its appalling truth. The ultimate irony of this breakdown is that the waste provides a ‘negative feedback loop’. We may not be able to see it, but we are intimately connected to it by the food chain we depend upon. Implicit in this non-holistic thinking is the notion that waste goes somewhere ‘other’ but in reality it goes into the land and oceans that feed and support us. The balance is delicate and it’s time we realised we are actually connected to a cycle of pollution that’s destroying the planets ability to support us.

The good news is that because we are ALL IMPLICATED we can ALL DO SOMETHING.

It is within this context that I create large-scale art installations out of waste ‘products’. From unpalatable emotions to corporate detritus I examine the parts of our ‘being’ that we shy away from dealing with. In essence these are the parts that will re-connect us to each other. So I ‘make visible’ that which is forgotten, left behind and discarded. I re-connect ‘parts’ so as to understand the whole.

Within this context I created ‘Smart Price’ (2012) at Threshold Festival, Liverpool, UK. It’s a work about the North Pacific gyre and it contains 132,000 disposable plastic knives and forks formed around a circular vortex. The plastic comes from a ‘bargain’ line sold by the world’s largest private employer, a supermarket. The material was sourced by a secondary supplier as it had already been discarded by the company.

I used the installation to pose the following questions to my audience:

Ø  What’s smart about a ‘disposable’ range of plastic that could last 300-500 years?

Ø  What price would you pay to preserve our ecosystem?

Ø  Which bit of the planet should we ‘save’?

I shall be using the plastic again in an effort to display it’s flexibility as a product, material and ultimately, an item of ‘value’. 

Early in January of 2012 I was running errands for my parents. While driving to the grocery store I noticed what looked like balloons high up in the sky. I counted them as I drove; 6, 7, 8, 9. As I got closer to where they were rising from, more were joining their kin in the freedom of flight. In a few seconds I could see exactly where these balloons were coming from. There was a man in a brown jacket cutting these balloons off of the new cars in our local Chevrolet dealership lot. I could not believe what I was seeing. I continued to watch the man as a traffic light in front of me turned red and I came to a stop. 

The dealership was directly to my front and left and I watched as the man in the brown jacket moved from car to car cutting these balloons free. A few times he even stepped back to watch them float away. There was a man sitting on a picnic bench in front of the dealership office watching him as he did this. With each moment that passed I got more and more furious. When finally the light turned green, with the dealership entrance directly to my left, I pulled into their lot. I was so upset at his indifference that I was shaking and on the verge of tears. How could someone litter so much, so carelessly and in front of so many people and not seem to care at all?!

As I got near enough to him he’d opened a side door and swept inside. Oh, I wanted to give that man a piece of my mind and rage was burning hotly in my skull. I crept slowly, still inside my truck, following this man in a brown jacket as he traversed the length of the building, just behind a wall of street facing windows. I wanted to scream and rant and push this man around until he understood how offensive his actions were and what he had done wrong. Of course, I realized I couldn’t possibly talk to this man, not being as emotional as I was. There was no way I would have been able to convey my feelings in any intelligible way. I’d have been a sobbing, frustrated mess unable to utter a single un-explicit word let alone a complete sentence or two conveying my thoughts.

As I drove away I called my mom and cried to her. She comforted me and let me know that she would help me write a letter to the dealership explaining what I saw and how it made me feel. That hasn’t happened. Instead I’ve posted a link on Herb Kinman Chevrolet’s Facebook page urging them to use biodegradable balloons and string if they aren’t already doing so. I can only hope that they are or, if not, that they look into something a little more ecologically friendly. I hope to never see this behavior repeated but it might take a little more urging. I don’t have the confidence to march in there and tell them how I feel or what I think they should do, I can only hope they take the time to read the link.

I’m not sure where this balloon, emblazoned with a Sherman Tank, came from.  I found it washed ashore on the island of Eleuthera in the Bahamas.  

We’ll, I don’t think it’s an Army balloon. The military disbanded the Union Army Balloon Corps after the Civil War, but not before Abraham Lincoln commissioned them to provide aerial battlefield reconnaissance. 

Maybe they’re from, THQ, a San Francisco based video game company that released 10,000 of them to celebrate their new toy, hundreds of them washing ashore in the San Francisco Bay.  Nope, not one of those, wrong ocean.

We might never know.  There a millions of balloons out there, floating, drifting, both aerial and aquatic.  In a 2006 report on the National Marine Debris Monitoring Program, of the 238,103 pieces of trash collected off U.S. beaches, they reported, “The dominant land-based indicator items collected during this national study were straws (65,384; 27.5%), balloons (18,509, 7.8%) and metal beverage cans (17,705; 7.4%).”    That’s a lot of balloons.

So what’s the alternative?  Could we celebrate graduations, weddings and birthday parties content with a few candles and a cake, maybe a paper sign, or just a round of applause?  If you must have a balloon, try these:

Paper Balloons at the Balloon Emporium. 

Natural Rubber Balloons with natural fiber string.  There are a dozen companies that sell them.  Here's the science of how they degrade.

This solution is an easy one.

 

 

 

My name is Maybelline Yeo. I am a student of Prof. Takada who analyzed the pellet samples which you collected and sent. 

Considering the location, we suspected that the location is very remote and predicted low pollutant concentration there. 

As predicted the overall pollutant concentration levels are very low to almost non-detected. 

PCBs which are mostly used in electronics and industries have the concentration of 0.01 ng/g pellet which we would categorize as not locally polluted.  

Because PCBs can be remobilized in the environment and is susceptible to long range transport, hence it can be found anywhere in the world. 

With such low level detected, we can suspect that it was transported from other areas and that there are no local sources of PCBs contamination in the area. 

But the extremely low concentration can also suggest that the pellets collected were not exposed to the environment long enough to reach equilibrium concentration with the surroundings.

Considered as a remote location, Cabo Polonio, Uruguay has similar PCBs concentration with the other remote areas in which we have analyzed.

From the world map, you can observe that area such as Isla Cebaco, Panama (1.49ng/g pellet), Kahuku Beach, Hawaii (0.74 ng/g pellet) and Costa Rica (7 ng/g pellet) are also categorized as remote areas all shows concentration of 10 ng/g pellet or less.

However, should we focus on individual samples, we would get alarming result.  To consider piece-to-piece variability of contaminant concentrations, we analyzed 5 pools of pellets for each location and  choose median concentration among the 5 pools to get representative contaminant concentration.  When we use the median, the story is as above, i.e., the location (Cabo Polonio) is very clean.  

However, if we were to see the concentrations of PCBs in the individual pools, we have one pool with extremely high concentration of PCBs (i.e., 24 ng/g) in comparison to the other pools.  

This sporadic high concentration of PCBs should be taken into account from the view of ecotoxicology.  That is, this pool of pellets may give threat to marine organisms in Cabo Polonio. 

General level of pollution is very clean in the area and minimal exposure of PCBs to marine organisms through water and food web is expected.  

To the organism in the area, plastics may bring relatively high concentrations of PCBs.  Similar phenomena (sporadic high concentrations of contaminants) is observed in many remote sites.  Your sample has given us the strong confirmation.  Marine plastics is unique but more hazardous transport media of POPs (persistent organic pollutants) in marine ecosystem.     

While the concentration of DDTs and HCHs which are used as pesticide, the concentration for DDTs were not detected while concentration for HCHs were below levels of quantification. 

Both results were not significant. This suggests that these pesticides were not used in the vicinity recently. 

There was not much information about the sampling area which I could gather online except that it is a very remote place and there’s a very small town in the area with no electricity or running water. Also, that there are no roads leading to Cabo Polonio and that it is only accessible via foot or a 4x4. And based on observation using Google Earth, there was no sign of any anthropogenic activity around the area. But we cannot be absolutely sure about the situation there, hence please feel free to concur, correct or comment on the sampling site.

Should there be any questions regarding the analytical results, please do not hesitate to ask.

Sincerely,

Maybelline

5 Gyres and blue plastic banannas from 5 Gyres on Vimeo.

From Westminster Hall we walked along the bank of the Thames River in low-tide to look for artifacts from centuries ago. This is a side-adventure from our real purpose: to meet with Greener Upon Thames to discuss how to keep plastic bags from tarnishing the Olympics.  London want’s to put it’s best foot forward, but single-use plastic bags are a step back.   5 Gyres staff, joined Greener Upon Thames, and our dear friend Roz Savage, to meet MP Zac Goldsmith in Westminster Hall to discuss the reality of plastic pollution in the North Atlantic Gyre and beyond.  Zac is a hero for sustainability in England and was eager to know more about the science of the issue. 

Once it was over we walked under Big Ben, over the bridge and along the Thames toward the Tate Modern.  We’ve been here before, invited by the Society of Thames Mudlarks to walk the muddy bank to find and keep broken artifacts.  This time we were on our own.

We found glass, bricks, piece from a slate roof, a brass nail from a boot heel, and long ceramic tubes buried in the hard sediment.  What a different assortment of refuse from the years before plastic.  The nail and other scraps of metal are relics slowly oxidizing into oblivion.  Anything organic from the past, like potato peels, paper books and anything wooden is long gone, reabsorbed into other life.  And the bits of glass and ceramic tubes are inert, that is they are as harmless as the sand and silica that created them. 

High on the bank of the river today, below the streets and walkways, we see petroleum-based plastic.  Bags, bottles, spoons and straws, a large assortment of typical single-use throw away plastic products litter the landscape.  Plastic is neither inert, biodegradable, or will oxidize away.  We know the river will take it to the North Atlantic Ocean where we’ve found it swirling in the Sargasso Sea, absorbing persistent organic toxins, and breaking down to the size of fish food.  Greener Upon Thames has a great solution, and it starts with the Olympics rejecting plastic bags.  It's simply the right thing to do, like not putting lead in paint, or putting seatbelts in cars.  You just don't make things designed to be thrown away out of materials that last forever. 

And those little ceramic tubes, they are the long slender pipes used for smoking tobacco centuries ago. 

A Poly Bag Tale from Prana Living on Vimeo.

Thanks Nicole.  You rule.  

Below is the official announcement of our Japanese Tsunami Debris Field Study in Spring, 2012

Crew Seats Available on Research Voyage to Investigate

Plastic Pollution and Debris from 2011 Japan Earthquake and Tsunami

LOS ANGELES, Calif., Oct. 5, 2011—Scientists, educators and eco-adventurers are being offered the unprecedented opportunity to join a research expedition through the North Pacific Ocean littered with debris generated by the Japan tsunami of March 2011. Rarely is such a monumental amount of material—tens of thousands of tons including cars, entire homes and boats—simultaneously thrust into the sea from a single location.

The 5 Gyres Institute and the Algalita Marine Research Foundation (Algalita) have organized this expedition in collaboration with Pangaea Explorations to offer a 7,000-mile, high-seas voyage aboard the Sea Dragon sailing vessel from May 1 through July 1, 2012.

The expedition’s first leg will sail from Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands through the area of the North Pacific Gyre commonly referred to as the “Western Garbage Patch” where little research has been conducted on plastic pollution.  The trip’s second leg will travel due east from Japan to Hawaii through the gyre, a vast vortex of ocean currents where plastic debris accumulates, to cross the “Japan Tsunami Debris Field.” Of great interest to the researchers is how fast the plastic trash is traveling across the gyre, how quickly or slowly it is decomposing, how rapidly marine life is colonizing on it, and whether it is transporting invasive species.

“We’ll be riding the same currents that are transporting cigarette lighters, bottle caps, children’s toys and all manner of other plastic pollution generated by the tsunami,” said expedition leader Marcus Eriksen, Executive Director and co-founder of the Los Angeles-based 5 Gyres Institute.

The 2012 voyage is open to anyone 18-years and older, regardless of sailing experience. Participants will travel with four professional crewmembers and will be expected to earn their sea legs and rough hands by hauling in lines and hoisting sails. They also will conduct research side-by-side with scientists, whether operating a trawl or collecting and cataloging plastic marine pollution and sea life. 

Nine crew seats are available at a cost of $13,500 each for Leg 1 and $15,500 each for Leg 2.  A portion of the fare is tax deductible and net proceeds will support Algalita and 5 Gyres’ cooperative research and educational outreach.    

This is the second eco-adventure conducted by Algalita. Its July 2011 voyage across the eastern North Pacific Gyre sold out.  5 Gyres has conducted 7 eco-adventures across the five subtropical gyres, including the first expeditions to the three southern hemisphere gyres.  Crewmembers included scientists, artists, journalists and environmentalists from around the world, such as Tim Silverwood of New South Wales.

"After first hearing of the devastating state of the North Pacific Gyre, I immediately had a desire to witness it for myself and tell the world about it,” Silverwood said. “Participating in leading scientific research with people from all over the world, all motivated to bring this issue to the mainstream, was incredible. The voyage has provided me so many opportunities to talk with media in the community and to schools about the issue and what we need to do to counter this problem." 

“Our vision is a global environment that is healthy, sustainable, and productive for all living creatures, free from plastic pollution,” says Algalita Executive Director, Marieta Francis.  â€œUnderstanding the impact of the Japan tsunami resultant debris will provide once-in-a-lifetime information to help us move closer to that vision.” 

Algalita and 5 Gyres, both nonprofit organizations, have been leaders in pioneering research and increasing global awareness of plastic marine pollution. Algalita’s founder, Captain Charles Moore, brought attention to the “Eastern Garbage Patch” in the North Pacific Gyre in 1999.  5 Gyres continues to monitor plastic marine pollution in the “garbage patches” found in all five subtropical gyres.  Most of the plastic debris studied has been adrift for years, much of it broken down by the sun’s rays and ocean currents into small plastic particles. 

For all participation requirements, sponsorship opportunities and to register, contact Jeanne Gallagher: (562) 598-4889; opsadmin@algalita.org.  

About 5 Gyres Institute: 5 Gyres Institute is a Los Angeles-based nonprofit organization committed to meaningful change through research, education and community action. 5 Gyres disseminates its findings through lectures, publications and traveling exhibits, and raises awareness about plastic marine pollution through sailing expeditions across the world’s oceans.  For information on upcoming expeditions and exhibitions around the globe: (323) 395-1843; info@5Gyres.org. 

About Algalita Marine Research Foundation: The Algalita Marine Research Foundation, a nonprofit organization based in Long Beach, CA, is dedicated to the protection of the marine environment and its watersheds through research, education, and restoration. Algalita conducts research and collaborative studies on the distribution, abundance and fate of marine plastic pollution and the potential harmful effects of plastics in the marine environment, including transference of toxins and their impact on human health; provides authoritative, educational findings to scientists, the general public, governmental agencies, and the private sector; collaborates with organizations working toward restoring the aquatic environment and ultimately eliminating plastic pollution. More information: (562) 598-4889; www.algalita.org.

About Pangaea Explorations:  Pangaea Explorations offers adventure sailing to actively strengthen the health of marine life through exploration, conservation and education work. Our mission is to inspire and develop a new generation of leaders in conservation science, communication, education, art and policy leadership. More information: www.panexplore.com.

But as we turned around the southwest side of Oahu, the lovely mellow gorgeous sailing turned into quit the scene. Over the next six hours everyone, except Captain Clive, Skipper Dale and Judy, a sailor/social worker from Hawaii who is the same age as my mom, took their turn leaning over the side of the Sea Dragon. At times, more than four of us were leaning over together. Yup, so much for me being the "one in ten people that don't get sea sick." But it wasn't that bad. It could have been worse. People were feeling worse that me. So I just pretended to feel okay. That's all you can do until you do feel okay.

For the last three days the swells have been ten plus feet and the winds have averaged around 25-30 knots. We've all worn our full foulies (waterproof overalls and jackets) and life vests most of the rainy days. But our little Sea Dragon and our amazing leaders, Clive and Dale have been working hard to get us through the trade winds. We are heading directly north while the winds are coming at us from the northeast. The winds are strong and they are making us put up a bit of a fight to get to the center of the gyre. But we are working our way there.

This morning (today is July 10) I work up feeling good. I poked my head out to deck at 730AM to see Marcus, the research leader from Algalita, and Skipper Dale, who is actually the expedition leader, preparing the research equipment. After helping tidy up the "snake pit," the area where all the lines come together in a massive mess, if not organized, I made oatmeal with a bit of banana and cinnamon for those who were up. Jin, a videographer from Korea, has now been calling me "little mama" for the morning because he was quite happy with his oatmeal. Jin doesn't speak English so our conversations are broken and entertaining. But his sidekick is Brandon, another film guy from Korea, who is also Jin's translator.

I've already been on night watch twice and it is taking some getting used to. This is not the South Atlantic Voyage with gorgeous calm seas and warm light winds. At least not yet. During both watches I daydreamed of fresh scones and crepes. But the most I could do was make some peppermint tea. But this hit the spot and was worth the ten bruises.

I'm ready for the research to begin. We are still waiting for the seas to calm a bit. And we have a birthday party tomorrow night. This means we will have to make a birthday cake for Aussie Tim, one of the founders of an Aussie non-profit called Take Three that focuses on beach cleanups and public education. I'm ready for cake now. This is a good sign.

Approx. Location:30 06.25N157 11.20W562 miles North of Honolulu

xo

I always seem to find a toilet seat--  this one (above) was tumbling in the surf.  It had just arrived.  Ming and I took a long walk along the shore to see what was washed up.  We're both preparing to embark on a voyage to the North Pacific Gyre - within hours now, but figured we would go see what the gyre had delivered to the beach.  We were stunned to see a confetti of multi-colored plastic on the surface of the entire beach, from end to end, and from the waters edge to the high tide line.

Kahuku Beach is on the Northshore of Oahu, Hawaii, and collects plastic pollution that sweeps through the gyre. This is what likely happens to most of the trash in the gyres.  Islands, like the dozens in the Hawaiian Archipelago, are the natural nets that collect plastic, but that’s doesn’t account for all of it.  The complete lifecycle of plastic pollution is unknown, but some ideas include sinking to the seafloor, photodegradation to the point of biodegradation, and beaching.    

What's clear to us is that if you want to clean the plastic in the gyre you simply have to clean your beach.  BEACH CLEANUP IS GYRE CLEANUP!  If you haven't been on a beach/river/street cleanup lately, try organizing one on your own.  Keeping plastic off the land keeps it from the sea.  It's that simple.

We left the beach with two boxes filled with plastic.  Tomorrow, we sail into the gyre to see if there's more. We know there will be. 

BIG THANKS to Al James and Dolorean for supporting our work!  You can BUY THE TUNE, "Disputed Trail" HERE.

VENTURA, Calif. (Embargoed June 22, 2011) — Patagonia Inc., the environmentally minded apparel company, and some of music’s most talented artists, including Dolorean have come together to form the Patagonia Music Collective in an effort to fund environmental activism. The program will launch Tuesday, June 22, 2011 at www.patagonia.com/music.

The collective brings together musicians, fans and grassroots environmental groups. Artists, such as Dolorean have donated unreleased tracks that will be sold for $.99 with net proceeds going directly to the artist’s favorite environmental group. Dolorean and Patagonia have joined together to benefit 5 Gyres. When a fan, activist or customer purchases “Disputed Trail” for $.99 via the Patagonia Music Collective, net proceeds will directly go to 5 Gyres in the artist’s name.

Says Al James of Dolorean, "5 Gyres Institute is a pioneer in exploring the open waters and spreading the word locally and globally about the plastic pollution that compromises our oceans. Once I got to know some of these courageous and optimistic explorers personally and heard the stories of their travels and research, I knew I had to get involved." 

“Patagonia is always looking for unique ways, above and beyond the 1% of sales we donate annually, to help fund the environmental movement,” notes Rob BonDurant, Patagonia’s VP of Marketing, “Musicians have been approaching Patagonia for years asking how they can be involved in the enviro work we do. This is our answer. Artists generously donate unreleased tracks – and the enviro group receives money from the song’s sales to fund its work. We are very excited about facilitating a direct connection between an artist’s fans and the grassroots groups working to save the planet. We’re hopeful fans will learn more about the group and cause their favorite artist supports and personally get involved.”

The tracks will be available at www.patagonia.com/music, through a dedicated iPhone® app and a web widget player on participating artist’s websites. Fulfillment will be handled by iTunes®. Visit www.patagonia.com/music for details.

About 5 Gyres:

The 5 Gyres Institute studies the impacts of plastic waste on the world’s oceans, marine life, and human health.  Having logged more than 25,000 miles at sea to be the first organization to cross the five subtropical gyres in the North and South Pacific, North and South Atlantic, and Indian Oceans, 5 Gyres shares it's scientific work globally through publications, lectures, and public awareness campaigns - and is unique in its focus on proactive, land-based solutions.

About Patagonia

Patagonia, with sales last year of over $333M, is noted internationally for its commitment to product quality and environmental activism. In Fall 2011, the Company’s entire product line will be recyclable thorough its Common Threads Recycling Program. The company also advocates corporate transparency through its interactive website, The Footprint Chronicles®, which outlines the environmental and social footprint of individual products. Patagonia was featured as The Coolest Company on the Planet on Fortune Magazine’s April 2007 cover.

Contact:

Stiv Wilson

Communications Director, 5 Gyres

stiv@5gyres.org

28.13S,106.18W

The wind begins to howl and the seas follow.  I left my hatch open and awoke to a splash of cold seawater on my back.   Outside the mainsail was reefed and the yankee and head sail were stowed.    30 knot gusts while crew are clipped in is a stark contrast to the balmy motionless sea we swam in two days ago.  The samples from the trawls are fascinating, and very different. 

Yesterday, before the waves rose, we pulled in the hi-speed trawl and found dozens of monofilament fibers inside.  Also, small multi-colored particles peppered the inside of the net, much smaller than the usual fragments.  This is what calm seas bring to the surface.  The nylon fibers are much closer to the density of seawater than the typical polyethylene fragments we find, so given enough time those fibers will slowly rise to the surface. 

We've just pulled in the hi-speed trawl after a turbulent night of sailing.  There are no fibers, and few of the smaller particles.  Heavy seas churn plastic pollution beneath the surface. The big question here is, “What is the effect of sea state on the vertical distribution of plastic pollution in the water column?”  Without this answer, we cannot know for sure if what’s on the surface represents what hovers a few meters below.

(By Anna Cummins) 

The boat moans eerily as is rocks side to side in the doldrums. There’s very little wind as we enter the accumulation zone of the South Pacific Gyre.  We’re finding little plastic in our trawls, which is fantastic news!  But we’re still finding some, which is not.  The manta trawl is out right now, having just pulled in the hi-speed trawl.  Those are the highlights of the day, the rest is self-induced entertainment for 13 people on the 72ft Sea Dragon.  Charlie is playing his bagpipes again.  A few are somehow able to sleep through it.  Some are reading or typing away on their macs.  Clive just finished his exercise routine.  I just finished mapping the perimeter of the South Pacific Gyre on the ships computer.  Garen and Sara are prepping for taking water samples as soon as the manta trawl comes in. 

The manta trawl is the one we deploy every 50 nautical miles.  We’ll drop it in the sea and tow it for 1 hour at 2 knots, therefore covering 2 nautical miles.  The trawl is 60 centimeters wide, so we’re covering an area of approximately 2,400 square meters.  It’s similar to half a soccer field.  Our last trawl had more than 15 particles of plastic pollution the size of grains of rice, which might not seem like much, but there are millions of soccer fields that fit on the surface of the South Pacific Ocean.

If you look at the map you’ll see an outer and inner circle.  These represent the outer dimensions of the South Pacific Gyre and the inner dimensions of the accumulation zone where floating debris collects, including plastic pollution.  We expect to pass through the center of the gyre in the next few days, then emerging out of the accumulation zone in a week. We’ll have more photos and reports to share as our expedition transects the gyre, studying plastic pollution in the region for the first time.

Uh-oh… Now what?

Like a scene out of West Side Story.  The Jets meet the Sharks, Latin American style.  From up over the crumbling cement of an eroding pier on Playa Los Angeles, they move toward us with intensity, with purpose.  There must be forty, even fifty in the gang… they far outweigh our crew. Intent all the while, each step brings them closer to where our group holds our ground.  Both groups charged with an energy and a cause – a reason to be right here, right in this moment. 

I turn to look at my comrades… their faces reflect similar splashes of purple, green orange and yellow paint to that splattered across my own – but through the holes in the face painted masks I can see the same look in their eyes as dances through my head… “What’s the protocol for a Uruguayan brawl?”

*****

On the list of things I wasn’t expecting to do a day after landing in Uruguay, getting my face painted with a bunch of the town locals wasn’t on it.  That said, I’ve never had an aversion to dressing up and making a bit of a scene, so trustingly I stepped in to a cultural experience directed by some new friends.

Not 24 hours earlier were we greeted by our loved ones, families and (surprisingly) a whole slew of locals hoisting signs above their heads and cheering.  Who were these folks?  During the press conference that followed moments after landing, 5 Gyres was introduced to these welcoming supporters and their local nonprofit.  Called Ecopolis, the group manages many facets of the environmental sustainability movement in Piriapolis, Uruguay. 

In addition to general education around resource management, sustainability and energy alternatives, Ecopolis has carved a niche in the coastal and beach activism arena. One of the most effective ways they see to educate and inspire activism from the community is through “skits.”  What I gleaned through the translators was that they’re not so much mini-plays as a display more akin to a parade.

“Can we do one?” I hear Leslie next to me inquire.  I wasn’t surprised she asked, and held my fingers crossed under the table that they would say yes.

“Si…” they said with surprise in their voices and faces.  “When?"

“How about tomorrow?”

And so it was that at 6:00pm on a Sunday – prime beach time in the city – we gathered at Los Angeles beach to begin preparations.  About 20 individuals showed up – local supporters, comrades from the Sea Dragon and volunteers with Ecopolis.  We were instantly splashed with face paint, doused with glitter, strewn with toy whistles and noise makers, and were taught the words of a chant:

Cuidemos nuestras playas

Tachin!

Juntemos la basura

Tachin!

Sumate y se uno mas

Tachin, Tachin, Tachin!

Roughly, this translates in to a catchy cheer about caring for our beaches and throwing away our trash.  “Tachin” is the Spanish version of “woop”, “hoorah” or “holler” as far as I can tell.  To the beat of a drummer and led by a flag dancer, the group of us began the chant and walked down on to the beach, yelling loudly, dancing and parading our signs for all the beach dwellers to see.

Insert for a moment some American mentality: a bit of nervousness on my part that what we were about to do would be a miserable flop.  That people don’t parade down beaches like this in the States.  What if people didn’t listen to us?  What if they laughed?  What if they threw their trash at us?

The reality of the situation couldn’t have been further from this imagined scenario.   To the contrary, the reception was uniquely Uruguayan, as far as I can tell – open, receptive and engaged all the time. 

There’s a massive 6-court beach volleyball tournament going on?  No problem.  They handed us the microphone and stopped the games to do our cheer for the audience and speak about our work. 

A family is quietly dining on empanadas, cobbed corn and mate?  No worries… they encouraged their little girls to bring the family’s trash to the bags we carried and deposit it. 

Oops, sorry, we just walked through your game of paddle ball by mistake – clapping and yelling and dancing?  Apparently not an issue here – they banged their paddles together and joined in on the cheer, lending strength to the message we carried.

The entire length of the beach we paraded, yelled, and carried on… feeding off the energy that the crowd in front of us was giving back.  It seemed like everything had gone perfectly.

And then we ran in to another group doing the same thing as us.  The Jets.

They had many more people than us.  They had bigger signs.  Music.  Costumes.  But surprisingly enough, they stepped back and quietly waited to cross our path on the beach until we were done with our chant.  When we were done, they applauded and yelled, and then swapped spots with us, taking formation in several long, spaced out lines.

Then something amazing happened.  Music started.  They looked at us and motioned for us to join them.  And we all started dancing.

I’ve never been involved in a flash mob before, and I don’t know if I’d count this one since we hadn’t rehearsed, but the moves were easy enough to follow that none of us made fools of ourselves.  We just boogied and danced our hearts out, laughing, on the beach.

When the music was done, they held up signs that spelled out, “No Violence.” We all shook hands, kissed cheeks, and went on our merry ways along the beach.

As we walked away, the realization of what a unique and powerful experience we’d just had hit me.  Not just standing up for something you believe in, but yelling, cheering, engaging others and ultimately shaking your booty for it in front of hundreds of other people.  I have the deepest gratitude for everyone with Ecopolis for opening our eyes to another way – different, but effective and engaging all the more – to bringing education and change to the community around us.

BOULDER, Colorado. Special Agent Close Call, aka, Sara Close, 5 Gyres's Development Director Reporting in From The Field. 

A HUGE thank you is in order for Mandy Stepanovsky’s brilliant class of 5th grade students at the Friend’s School.  Based in Boulder, Colorado, I had the opportunity to visit on Monday morning – and I can’t think of a better way to have started my week.

Prior to leaving for the South Atlantic expedition in late-December, Ms. Stepanovsky and I corresponded about introducing the topic of plastic pollution and the gyres in to the science curriculum for her class.  After introducing them to the subject via a ‘mini-unit’, we decided to test some new waters – a virtual teaching classroom via Skype.  For about ten minutes, I spoke to them about my work with 5 Gyres and the trip I was about to embark on, and then each of the kids took turns coming up to the computer camera and asking me questions.

Not only did it work incredibly well, but it gave the students an opportunity to personally meet with someone who is connected with the issue – even though I was entirely across the country in Virginia.   I was amazed at the level of enthusiasm, intellect and concern for this issue demonstrated by the class – and considered myself lucky to have had the opportunity to ‘meet’ them via Skype.

Well, then I got to meet them in person.  I am blown away by this class.

Not only did they follow the 5 Gyres blog during the expedition and continue to study this issue, but they were encouraged as a class to run with their ideas of how to contribute to a solution.  Thus, not only did they initiate and conduct their own outreach and education campaign in the school, giving presentations to all of the classes from K-5, but they also got crafty.  Gathering plastic trash from other classrooms in the school, the students designed and constructed planters into which they planted an array of herbs and vegetables. 

The beautiful array of colorful, repurposed plastic planters sit on the windowsill in their classroom, where they are attended to and watered daily.  Once fully grown, the class intends to sell them as a means to raise funds, and donate the proceeds to 5 Gyres.

The level of understanding, compassion and sincere desire to help evident in this class makes me reminded – as I thankfully am, quite often – of why I love my job, and why I’ll never question my belief of investing in and educating kids for a brighter, plastic-free tomorrow.

Plastic marine debris is a pervasive type of pollution. River basins and estuaries are a source of plastics pollution for coastal waters and oceans. Estuarine fauna is therefore exposed to chronic plastic pollution. Three important catfish species [Cathorops spixii (N = 60), Cathorops agassizii (N = 60) and Sciades herzbergii (N = 62)] from South Western Atlantic estuaries were investigated in a tropical estuary of the Brazilian Northeast in relation to their accidental ingestion of plastic marine debris. Individuals from all three species had ingested plastics. In C. spixii and C. agassizii, 18% and 33% of individuals had plastic debris in their stomachs, respectively. S. herzbergii showed 18% of individuals were contaminated. All ontogenetic phases (juveniles, sub-adults and adults) were contaminated. Nylon fragments from cables used in fishery activities (subsistence, artisanal and commercial) played a major role in this contamination. These catfish spend their entire life cycles within the estuary and are an important feeding resource for larger, economically important, species. It is not yet possible to quantify the scale and depth of the consequences of this type of pollution. However, plastics are a well known threat to living resources in this and other estuaries. Conservation actions will need to from now on to take plastics pollution into consideration.

The people at the end of the road, that we sometimes forget exist, bear the burden of civilization's excess.  The developing world wants the affluence and convenience of the west, but the infrastructure for waste management does not exist.  Our collective conscience cannot tolerate the synthetic chemistry of our industrial and technological advances to become the burden of our poorest communities or reside in the bodies of our children, yet today everyone carries this chemical legacy.  The producers of plastics have an obligation to plan for the post-consumer life of their product, all the way to the end.  If you want to clean the 5 gyres in the ocean of plastic waste, then give your time and funds to those that clean up these watersheds, where plastic hurts people.  And more importantly, to those legislative advocates that prevent the proliferation of plastic pollution throughout society.  To reach the people at the end of the road, we have to begin our work there and work backwards to ourselves.

After several hours delay clearing immigration, Sea Dragon wayed anchor and wove her way out of the bay of islands that comprises the sound that would serve as our last taste of terra-firma for some thirty days. We wove our way around hazards to land’s end just at dark, setting sail for Capetown, with the crew processing the full spectrum of emotions that befall the terrestrial spirit as she prepares for an epic journey into such a vast and uknown wilderness.

A few surprises lay in our path as we sailed for the open ocean, typical of Brazilian waters --  unlight rocks, fishing vessels without lights --  whose captain felt it unnecessary to alert us of his presence until just a hundred meters off our starboard bow. On watch on the foredeck I yelled for crew Mary Maxwell, at the helm to veer hard to port, giving the vessel a wide berth as we passed. The swell, compressed by the land masses it filtered through in a process known as focusing, were short in frequency, meaning Sea Dragon, 72 feet, would be cresting two wave peaks at a time, making for rough conditions.

It’s always a quick sorting out when we get underway, often with inexperienced seafaring crew who don’t yet know if they will succumb to seasickness. From my experience, about 9 out of 10 crew experience some sort of effect, all to varying degrees. I’m one of the lucky ones (knocks on wood). So, as expected those who fell ill would take time adjusting to life at sea. And much vomiting was to be heard on deck today. The fishes were fed.

The crew despite their illnesses, are all top notch and I’m inspired by each of their life stories.  As always, The 5 Gyres Institute looks for different accolades in our crew, from science, to art to education. It’s our firm belief as an organization that the science of plastic pollution can no longer remain just in academia, and thus we need filmmakers, artists, activists, pro surfers, educators and world sailors to share in our mission to change the world’s addiction to single use plastic. We need to reach millions, not thousands.

On deck is like a salon for learning multiple disciplines by folks who are experts in their fields. It’s our hope that the exposure to science that works as the foundation for our expeditions will be shared and disseminated to many people, through art, music, sailing/surfing culture, film, the written word and education. It’s why we do what we do in the way we do it. And as always, I’m honored to be a part of the team.

Leaving, I found myself whole again; personally, I long for the sea when I’m away from her. I like the work of sailing and the challenges of ordinary chores at sea. I love the beauty. Yes, on these voyages we’ll come across tremendous horrors, being confronted with the stain of our culture, but we’re reminded of what we wish to protect in every sunset, in every moonrise and every new appearance of a celestial body in the gloaming.

Right now, we’ve gained about 170 nautical miles to our Southeast, heading for one of the smaller accumulation zones that has never been studied by anyone before. We need to get 200 miles off the coast of Brazil before any science can be conducted and right now, we’re traveling about 8-9 knots, mainsail with a reef and forward staysail (smaller amounts of sail due to steady 20-23 knot winds). The seas are still a bit rough, but the wave period should increase a bit, and we’ll swing eastward and the wind should swing a bit more to the north making life aboard a bit more comfortable for all.

At dawn we’ll begin sampling the ocean for plastic as well as persistent organic pollutants, sampling plastic about every 50 nautical miles until Capetown. Right now, this crew member needs to get a bit of sleep before my night watch and my first full survey of the constellations of the southern hemisphere.

5 Gyres wouldn't be possible without your support. Please consider supporting our ongoing work and help us do the research and be the change the world needs to end plastic pollution by donating. Every amount makes a difference. Click here to learn more. 

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASEMedia Contact: Zan Dubin Scott(310) 383-0956zan@zdscommunications.com

 

Pioneering Researchers Launch World’s 1st South Atlantic Ocean Plastic-Pollution Study 

Pro Surfers Join Voyage to Advance Research on Impact of Floating Pollution on Human Health & Marine Life

SANTA MONICA, CA; OCT. 27--Researchers will embark on the world’s first voyage of its kind on Nov. 8 to show that every ocean on the globe is polluted with plastic garbage harming marine wildlife and potentially threatening human health. The 5 Gyres Institute, collaborating with Algalita Marine Research Foundation (AMRF) and Pangaea Explorations, is leading this expedition.

The 5 Gyres team, lead by co-founders Marcus Eriksen, PhD and Anna Cummins, will sail from Rio de Janeiro to Cape Town, South Africa on the first transatlantic Southern Hemisphere plastic-pollution research trip. The husband-and-wife team, overseeing a 13-member crew of researchers, journalists and others for the first global study of the problem, want the world to know that the scourge is not confined to a single mythical “Texas-size garbage patch.”

“You can’t cross an ocean today without finding plastic pollution,” says Cummins, co-founder of 5 Gyres Institute, a Santa Monica, CA-based nonprofit organization.

A gyre is a rotating system of ocean currents where floating debris accumulates. Eriksen and Cummins plan to produce the first comprehensive snapshot analysis of plastic pollution in each of the globe’s five gyres. Building on AMRF’s discovery of plastic pollution in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, the 5 Gyres crew has discovered garbage patches in the North Atlantic Gyre and the Indian Ocean Gyre. No other researchers have been to as many gyres.

Two renowned professional surfers, James Pribram and Mary Osborne, will join the voyage to help raise awareness. “My goal is to share my experience with the world in becoming a spokesperson against plastic waste,” says Pribram, a.k.a. the ECO-Warrior and O’Neill ambassador.

“We want to show people wherever we sail that the problem contaminates their international waters,” Eriksen says. “They cannot say, ‘Well, that’s across the ocean, what does that have to do with my country?’ “

5 Gyres’ Rio-to-Cape Town voyage will be aboard Pangaea Explorations’s racing sloop, Sea Dragon.  In addition to sailing through gyres, the team aims to advance its research into whether humans are being harmed by eating fish that have ingested plastic debris contaminated with persistent organic pollutants such as DDT and PCBs. PhD candidate Chelsea Rochman of UC Davis will lead this research. Cummins has already found trace elements of such toxins in her body. The crew will also analyze seawater for the same pollutants.

The Sea Dragon crew will be communicating via blogs with more than 1,850 Los Angeles school children through AMRF’s Ship-2-Shore Education program. Charles Moore, AMRF’s founder, first put the Great Pacific Garbage Patch on the map. 

Eriksen and Cummins plan to sail across the South Pacific Gyre—the fifth subtropical gyre—in March 2011.

5 Gyres is partnering with the United Nations Environmental Program’s Safe Planet campaign and Eriksen and Cummins will be speaking at AMRF’s 2011 Plastics Are Forever International Youth Summit and Training Program.

The Sea Dragon’s crew: Clive Cosby, skipper; Dale John Selvam, first mate; Marcus Eriksen and Anna Cummins, 5 Gyres Institute co-founders; Stiv Wilson, 5 Gyres communications director; Chelsea Rochman, PhD candidate; Bonnie Monteleone, marine scientist; James Pribram, pro surfer; Mary Osborne, pro surfer and Patagonia Ambassador; Michael Lutman, filmmaker; Jody Lemmon, filmmaker; Rich Sundance Owen, Environmental Cleanup Coalition; Mary Maxwell, interested citizen.

5 Gyres’s Rio-to-Cape Town sponsors include Chaco, Quiksilver and Ecousable.

About 5 Gyres Institute: 5 Gyres Institute is a nonprofit organization committed to meaningful change through research and education. 5 Gyres disseminates its message and findings through national lecture tours and raises awareness of ocean plastic pollution through voyages including that aboard JUNKraft, the boat built in 2008 of 15,000 plastic bottles. The organization’s collaboration with Algalita Marine Research Foundation and Pangaea Explorations provide it with a marine laboratory and research vessel, respectively.  After studying the five subtropical gyres, 5 Gyres will monitor these vortexes through Traveling Trawl Program voyages which loan research equipment to volunteer “citizen scientists.”

PHOTOS FOR MEDIA: Please use these photographs of Eriksen and Cummins on previous voyages, of plastic particles taken from a fish’s stomach, and of James Pribram and Mary Osborne. Media Contact: Zan Dubin Scott, (310) 383-0956; zan@zdscommunications.com.

Follow our journey:  twitter.com/5gyres

http://www.facebook.com/5gyres

Free iphone app.-   5 Gyres.  

Zan Dubin Scott

ZDS Communications for 5 Gyres

O:  (310) 392-1130  C:  (310) 383-0956

F:  (310 392-1318

http://www.zdscommunications.com

 

What would happen if the Bottle Rocket floated out to sea? The Bottle Rocket, a raft fabricated from 232 2-liter bottles, rolled up to the National Mississippi River Museum and Aquarium for the second time. In 2003 I paddled here to take a break from rafting the Mississippi. I stayed for a week and talked with visitors about what it's like to raft the river. Now, 7 years later, it's the same conversation, but I've added what I've learned about plastic.

So would happen if my 2000-mile journey had not ended in the Gulf of Mexico? The Bottle Rocket would have drifted into the Loop Current, a mini-gyre in the Gulf. From there the Gulf Stream, a river of warm water that feeds the Atlantic Ocean, would have taken the Bottle Rocket around Florida, along the east coast of North America and into the North Atlantic Subtropical Gyre. It would sit there for years, while the metal oxidized and wood decomposed, leaving the remaining plastic to persist. In 2010 we crossed the North Atlantic to study plastic pollution. We possibly would have found the bottle caps from the Bottle Rocket still floating in the gyre.

You can see the Bottle Rocket and Algalita's exhibit on plastic pollution at the St. Louis Science Center during the weekend of Oct. 15-18.

If you haven't already seen Tapped, you're missing out big time. Winner of a long list of film festivals, Tapped is a phenomenally powerful, shocking, and engaging film about the bottle water industry scam that I guarantee will leave you rearing to get involved.

And now, when you buy a DVD of Tapped, or order a reusable bottle on their site, a donation goes back to 5 Gyres! Enter the code "5 Gyres" when you purchase on line, and $5 for a DVD/bottle, or $10 for both go towards supporting our upcoming expeditions to the South Atlantic and Pacific Gyres.

Watch the trailer here, order a copy, organize a screening in your local hood, and join a growing movement of people who are refusing single use plastics.

Or find 4 groups to sponsor a trawl, and come on board yourself! We have a few spaces left for dedicated crew, willing to work, play, sail, and have a once in a lifetime experience while making a difference.

Maybe that's you....

For anyone who doubts that fish might have feelings, take a look at this affectionate Grouper who loves being tickled under the chin:

Thanks for the interview Chris, looking forward to collaborating more on this issue.

Get 'Em Jean. We're with you. 

Team member Stiv reporting here. I will start by saying I'm not an oceanographer, but I am an investigative journalist by trade and I've spent the better part of four years researching plastic pollution issues from science to policy.  What I've learned is that the problem of plastic pollution has very little to do with pure oceanography, and much more to do with waste management infrastructure, global economics/markets, polymer chemistry, watershed hydrology, and countless other disciplines--  in short, any solution, to truly be informed, needs to be derived from a multidisciplinary approach.

However, understanding how gyres work is of utmost important, and there are very, very few experts out there who can speak credibly to their movements. I've spoken with almost all the experts on how the gyres work (most notably Curtis Ebbesmeyer and Nicolai Maximenko advises the 5 Gyres science team), what factors affect how they behave, and what I've learned is that gyres are very difficult to read.  

What I've also learned is that the solutions being proposed and applied to the marine plastic epidemic are often, anything but scientific.  As an activist, I can get downright angry about the notion of gyre cleanup, and when I see stories in the media about it, it often elicits a visceral response from me. Obviously, this is not a helpful vantage in the grand scheme of things, but the motivation for my response is simple:  selling the idea of gyre cleanup to the public actually makes the problem worse.  If a barge full of plastic comes back from the gyre, and helicopters take pictures of it, and newspaper headlines read, 'gyre cleanup group's first mission to clean plastic from the gyre is successful,' the ocean is in for a world of hurt. 

In the coming weeks, I will state my case in parts on the 5 Gyres blog, talking about some of the nuances associated with the notion of cleanup.  We'll look at the issue from scale to politics, and we'll attempt to bring some transparency as to which groups are funded (at least partially) by a plastics industry that fights us tooth and nail on ANY policy which would reduce plastic consumption, and what that may or may not mean in with regard to how these groups message to the public.  

We'll also share some good news:  you don't need to go out to the ocean to clean up plastic as the gyres themselves upon each full rotation spit plastic out.  The North Pacific Gyre, for example, takes three years to complete an orbit and dumps roughly 50% of it's contents (Curtis Ebbesmeyer, Flotasmetrics).  This flotsam will either wash up on land or go into another gyre.  All you need to do to clean the gyres is pick what washes up off the beach, and stop it from being thrown in, in the first place.  

PART ONE: THE SCALE OF GLOBAL PLASTIC POLLUTION

If you haven't sailed to a garbage patch, it's very difficult to understand what they look like and how big they actually are. Contrary to popular media, they are not a floating island the size of Texas. They're incredibly diffuse and plastic pollution is everywhere in the ocean, not just in the gyres. Gyres simply concentrates it. Sailing across the North Atlantic taught me something that all oceanographers know, but don't necessarily say:  the ocean is BIG, and running the numbers on how much garbage is out there is an extremely difficult task because the scale itself is hard to noodle on.  

According to one of SEA's leading researchers, Giora Proskurowski, plastic is extremely diffuse and calculating its density is very difficult.  If we were to attempt to quantify how much is out there, we need to do some big math. Giora's data states that concentration in The Atlantic gyre is about 50,000 .1g pieces per square kilometer on the surface.  If we apply big math to that simply for the sake of getting an idea of scale, we get:  5 kilograms per square kilometer or roughly 11 pounds per square kilometer on the surface. There are 316 million square kilometers of ocean surface.  This makes for about 3.5 billion pounds of degraded plastic fragments fewer than 5mm in length on the surface of the ocean worldwide.  Again, this is an extremely conservative estimate, extrapolating from a local data set to show the scale in the world. Giora's work, for example, shows that plastic doesn't just exist on the surface, it gets stratified within the water column, close to 90 feet down (not to mention all the types of plastic that sink, too, which is about half of the types manufactured). This estimate doesn't include all the big pieces you find in various garbage patches within the gyres, but we'll leave that weight out for now.  

So, for the purposes of argument, let's say that for each of those 90 feet of stratification, there is roughly the same weight per foot.  Now we're up to 315 billion pounds in the ocean. For comparison, The Gulf Spill is spewing roughly 2.5 million pounds of oil per day.  

COST OF CLEANUP, HYPOTHETICAL

A supertanker's dead weight (amount of weight it can carry) is 500 million pounds. That would mean that to clean the ocean, you'd need to fill 630 oil supertankers to the brim at a cost of about $56,000 per each a day to charter (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development).  So, to cleanup the gyres (assuming there is actually technology out there to do it which, as of today, nothing has been proven to work), we're looking at a cost of at least about $35 million a day or roughly $13 billion a year, and about 17% of all the oil tankers in service in the world would have to be full time devoted to cleaning it up. 

Again, these numbers here are as conservative as I can get across all spectrums.  

SCALE OF A WASTE STREAM

Now let's talk about the scale of waste.  As of 1992, the world (5.5 billion people, which today has grown to 7 billion) dumped 14 billion pounds of garbage in the ocean each year, over half (at least) is synthetics (if we apply this statistic over 40 years-- the plastics era in the limelight-- we get a very similar number to the 315 billion pound number stated before of overall plastics in the ocean). Worldwide, we're looking at 1-3% recycling rates on plastic, a number based on an industry that is governed by supply and demand. The plastics industry produces 250 billion pounds of virgin raw plastic pellets per year. Okay, so now we at least have an 'some idea' of what we're dealing with.  

One American's 'garbage in the ocean' footprint is about 600 (as of 1992) pounds annually (if you want to know precisely what your plastics in the ocean footprint is do a simple experiment: throw all your waste in the same bin for a week.  Separate organic materials and synthetics. Determine the percentage of synthetics and apply that percentage to that 600 pound number, and you'll know roughly how much damage your lifestyle causes on the ocean in terms of weight.) 

CONCLUSIONS

Yes, it's bad, and it's overwhelming and it's getting worse, fast.  Just to stop how much we contribute as a world annually, we'd need 14 full time oil tankers operating everyday, at a cost of roughly $286 million annually--  ouch.  Scale, yes it's a a crazy amount to even comprehend, and even if the problem was 1/10th of what we stated here, we're still dealing with degrees of scale much larger than cleanup technology allows.  In short, the plastic needs to stop going into the ocean in the first place, and that's where gyre cleanup efforts should be focused if well intentioned people are meaning to take meaningful action.  

Stay tuned to the blog, as I'll investigate this issue more deeply throughout the next few weeks.  

 I'm wondering what our new mission statement for The 5 GUYS Institute will be. We'd certainly get more girls involved, and maybe have some fun parties. Here's a vision of the The 5 Guys Project - Leslie and I with a group of divers in the Azores. Our new mascots?

:

Check out 5 Gyres on the National Geographic Channel tomorrow night, July 3, @ 7-10pm ET, to watch Mississippi River Quest, a journey down the Mississippi River from the beginning at Lake Itasca, Minnesota 2,300 miles to the Gulf of Mexico. 

Swedish home appliance manufacturer Electrolux has found a use for the plastic trash that proliferates our oceans. The new Vac from the Sea project aims to cull plastic from several collection zones and create "concept" vacuum cleaners to bring attention to the colossal marine pollution problem. 

While we may have doubts as to the viability of this idea as a way to utilize the plastic trash to create a sustainable product or to "clean up" the gyres (an endeavor which has proven to be inexecutable at best, and dangerously misleading to the public as well as overly conciliatory to the plastics industry at worst), we have to give them kudos for creative problem-solving -- they are helping to raise awareness of one of the biggest environmental threats of our time. 

Nice work, Electrolux.

5 Gyres photo in Discovery News

Guess what?  In order to add drama to California's proposed state wide plastic bag ban, the good folks over at the ACC have unearthed a startling revelation.  Dirty reusable bags are in fact, dirty.  That means if you don't wash your reusable bag from time to time, it's going to get dirty. Just like your underwear or your socks do if you don't wash them.  We've seen the ACC do some pretty dumb things over the years trying to justify their contribution to the global marine eco-disaster that is plastic pollution in the ocean, but this one takes the cake. What's next? Reminding us that cream will curdle in your reusable coffee cup if left in the sun?  Thanks ACC, good job keeping us safe!  Read the full story here.  

Team member Stiv reporting here. I'm not a pro film maker, but I was able to put a bit of footage together that I shot on our expedition in January and February of this year.  It captures a bit of the essence of what it's like to sail the ocean searching for plastic.

Thanks to our new friends at Dentsu America for this amazing graphic, beautifully illustrating the concept of "bio accumulation". In short, tiny fish eats plastic particles, bigger fish eats many smaller fish, Octopus eats bigger fish, we eat Octopus, or Tuna, or Mahi Mahi --

Now what's ending up on our dinner plate? This is one of the big questions.

We gave a presentation at Dentsu the other month, invited by Jesse Nicely, a business savvy designer/brand strategist who has been following the plastics issue.  After popping in last week to brainstorm with him, his inspired co-worked Kim Linn designed this graphic! We're excited to formulating some projects with Jesse and the Dentsu team that focus on realistic solutions for businesses that use plastics. Helping these businesses make the right choice will go a long way towards solving this issue on land. Thanks Dentsu!

By, Dr. Marcus Eriksen, cofounder, The 5 Gyres Institute

Stand on any island in the 5 Gyres and you'll see the plastic come to you. First a bottle cap, a cigarette lighter, maybe even a fishing buoy, washing up among millions of tiny fragments of plastic confetti.  If you want to get plastic out of the 5 gyres, islands are the natural nets to capture plastic, with no need for ships, no carbon footprint, no damage to marine life in the process, just a steady stream of fuel coming your way.  Contrary to popular belief, the gyres do kick it out and the islands catch it.

What's that?  Did I say fuel?  YES. 8% of a barrel of oil is plastic, 4% is the raw material and 4% the energy required to polymerize the stuff.  Polyethylene and polypropylene wash up in heaping piles on the Hawaiian Islands, Bermuda and the Azores in the North Atlantic, Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, St. Helena and Ascencion Island in the S. Atlantic, and dozens more islands in the S. Pacific.  

But what can you do with all that plastic?  Plasma. We visited Pyrogenesis in Montreal, Canada recently to learn about waste to energy from plastic pollution.  "It can burn anything, from circuit boards to fish bones, and certainly all that plastic washed up on beaches," they explained to us.  "How about a dead housecat?" I asked.  "Sure, I'm sure that would work," he answered with a chuckle.  Imagine a device that shreds waste and passes it through a lightening bolt, using the exhaust gasses produced to power engines to run the machine.  As long as you can feed it plastic, it produces more power than it needs to run itself.  Net positive power, no dioxins or furans produced, less need to import fossil fuels to make energy, less landfill space occupied, and cleaner beaches.

Okay, this works as a viable post-consumer plan.  We know the real solutions are source reduction, not treating symptoms.  But with estimates of 3-5 million tons of plastic pollution in the world's oceans, there must be a plan to deal with the waste we have, while we turn off the tap.

Anyone who's feeling down in the dumps about our planetary prospects should spend more time with kids. This morning, we finished up our 25th school visit in 6 months, visiting over 5,000 students around Los Angeles. These kids "get it", especially when they learn about how marine animals are harmed by plastic trash.

Earlier this week we met a remarkable young 9 year old from La Ballona Elementary - Devin Newman, who is clearly an emerging poet. She whipped out 2 poems for us during our visit, printed them on the spot, and handed them to us as we walked out. These are the kinds of moments that keep us going....thank you Devin! We'll be keeping tabs on this future leader. Here are 2 of her many, many poems - we have a feeling there are more to come!

OUR PLANET EARTH                               HELP OUR PLANET!

If we work together,                                    What I'm sayingAnd don’t make a fuss.                               Is not fantasticWe’ll make Earth healthy,                           Fish in the oceanAnd she’ll protect us.                                  Are eating plastic!Now we bring our own bags,                      Trash and garbage in the seaAnd we recycle our waste.                          Why couldn't all of this We were sticking together,                          Have happened to me?Like bricks on paste.                                   I will ask all of you We save energy,                                         How you would've feltAnd we do the three R’s.                            In an arctic that'sAnd we take bikes to school,                      Beginning to meltInstead of driving in cars.                           Lots and lots of angry mobsDon’t turn up the heat,                               Are swarmingYou know you can do better.                      Because of the cause of global warming

So grab a blanket,Or wear a sweater.                       It is causing,A lot of commotion.When trash and plastic,Is in the ocean.

  - Devin Newman, age 9

Louis Hoock, aka "Captain Hook", has launched his 10,000 mile trip to clean the gyres by focusing on beach cleanup. As he says, "Gyre cleanup is impractical by going to the gyres.  You will spend less time and money, smaller carbon footprint, and not kill marine life, if you go to the islands and let the plastic come to you."

Captain Hook has launched an effort to sail 10,000 miles on the West Coast to cleanup plastic garbage and 5 Gyres let him a Manta Trawl to collect samples as he goes.  Nice work Captain Hoock we're interested in seeing the cost per pound for beach recovery vs. gyre recovery. Bon voyage!

Inspired by the movie “Addicted to Plastic,” a six-store grocery chain on the east coast is banning the sale of bottled water in their stores, installing in-store water filtration systems and eliminating unnecessarily-bagged produce.   

“Societies are truly addicted to plastic, much in the way we are addicted to oil,” said Scott Nash, founder and CEO of Rockville, Md.-based MOM’s. “The tragic part of our addiction is that, by and large, petroleum-based plastics are not necessary for consumer products and packaging, as we have the technology and innovation to use plastic products that biodegrade.”

 Click here for the full story.

Stop [Plastic] Motion from Taina Uitto on Vimeo.  

I love this photo--  covering oneself in petroleum products to pick up petroleum products on a beach to ensure that the organic crude is hermetically sealed in polyethylene in a landfill. When will tragedy finally lead to wisdom, and then wisdom to solution?  

Three days ago, we walked the Mississippi Gulf Coast, watching two devastating petroleum spills washing up on the beach. We've all heard of the one. The second oil spill isn't immediately obvious, but far more widespread, and equally deadly....

Another dangerous chemical found in plastic -- bisphenol AF – might be even an more potent estrogen-mimicker than BPA.        

Deemed “a vicious compound," bisphenol A’s newly-identfied twin is raising strong health concerns.

Link to article in Science News

Most land-based debris is conveyed to oceans via urban runoff through storm drains. The main sources of plastic and other types of anthropogenic (human-made) debris in urban runoff include: litter (mostly bags, packaging and single-use disposable products), industrial discharges, garbage transportation, landfills, construction debris, and debris from commercial establishments and public venues.

From plasticdebris.org, a project of Algalita Marine Research Foundation and the California Coastal Commission: "80% of marine debris comes from land-based sources." Faris, J. and Hart, K., Seas of Debris: A Summary of the Third International Conference on Marine Debris, N.C. Sea Grant College Program and NOAA, 1994, title page.

The drive to Indian Beach in Ecola State Park has got to be one of the best beach drives in the entire state of Oregon. Sitka Spruce tower overhead as you meander along a shaded road through a dense coastal forest and lead you to a breathtaking view of the Pacific Ocean. As this is a rock beach, there are many places for marine debris to get lodged. Needless to say, we found a lot of plastic. Unfortunately the beach-combing expedition was cut short and I was not able to collect or photograph as much as I would have liked, but among the items found were abundant bottle caps, plastic fragments, fishing rope, and oyster spacers from Japan.

This balloon was found washed ashore at 3 Mile Beach CA.

One of the more ubiquitous marine debris items is the balloon with curly-cue ribbons trailing behind, usually densely intermingled with seaweed.  I used to wonder what happened to released balloons once they left the fingertips of a birthday kid whose grip loosened or at the end of a celebration when the strings were cut and balloons were emancipated to the skies. Now that I’ve been looking, I see that they often end up in our seas and eventually, are brought back to our shores to show us where they’ve been. Aside from deadly entanglement issues, marine animals like sea turtles wind up mistaking floating balloons for squid and ingesting them. There have been many accounts of marine animals -- dolphins, whales, sea turtles, fish, and seabirds - sea turtles swallowing balloons. Balloons are usually found washed up singularly, but occasionally form twisted aggregations. Ribbons (made of plastic) used to tie balloons can pose more of a problem than the balloons, which can be made of natural latex.

Balloons make their way around the gyre just as any other piece of plastic would – there is no way to know the when and where of this balloon’s origins, but you can see from the accumulation of barnacles and algae that it has made its rounds through and possibly across the ocean. For every downed balloon you see on a beach, you can assume there are many, many more waiting to be ingested by sea life or washed ashore.

The following information is from Clean Ocean Action:

"Dr. Peter Lutz, noted sea turtle biologist in Florida, published a study in 1990 on the ingestion of latex balloon pieces by sea turtles....Dr. Lutz' study found:

1. When offered a mix of pieces of clear plastic and brightly colored latex, the turtles showed a strong preference for the latex pieces over the plastic.

2. In experiments with latex only, sea turtles demonstrated that if their appetite is sufficient, they will actively swim towards and ingest latex materials, that all colors are acceptable, and that the amount ingested will depend on their nutritional state.

3. The length of time that the latex remained in the turtle's intestinal tract ranged from a few days to four months, with a peak time period of eight weeks. (Note: the normal gut passage time in sea turtles is approx. 10 days.)

4. Turtles passed multiple pieces bound together, although they had ingested the individual pieces at different times, showing the possible cumulative effect of ingestion of latex balloon pieces.

Evidence of Impacts: Scientists who work with stranded whales, dolphins, seals and sea turtles have been looking at the stomach contents of these dead marine animals. These scientists have found balloons, parts of balloons and balloon string during numerous necropsies.

Releasing balloons into the air is littering, and ultimately the balloons will return to earth. The balloon industry claims that balloons explode in many tiny harmless fragments when they reach a certain altitude. Beach Sweep data refutes this claim. Over 32,000 balloons were picked-up on beaches during the 1999 cleanup - clear evidence that many return to earth intact.

About a week ago, I had the honor of interviewing Curtis Ebbesmeyer, famed oceanographer, gyre researcher and author of the great book, Flotsametrics.  Curt's work on the behavior of the subtropical oceanic gyres in our world has been invaluable and much of what we know about them is because of his work. 

As a side note to the interview, I mentioned the gulf catastrophe we're currently enduring and how the ocean is faced with many and sundry threats.  Curt made a remark that nearly floored me.  The media has been frenzied over the gulf and for good reason, but what is its true environmental impact if you scale it compared to others?  As Curt said, "Oil is organic, it will go away, plastic never goes away and kills more animals every year than any oil spill."  Now, understand that Curt is by no means insensitive to the horror facing the south or the economic impact on the fisherman and ocean based industries.  His comment was much more academic, coming from a career oceanographer with his science hat on. But still, even after personally having been to the Atlantic Gyre, crossing some 3,000 miles of ocean,  I hadn't realized the degree of scale we're talking about with plastic pollution. Truly, it's difficult to comprehend.  

One of our founders at The 5 Gyre Project, Dr. Marcus Eriksen, has been defined by a life surrounded by oil-- he's been a plastic pollution activist for over a decade and saw firsthand the economy of oil as a First Gulf War Veteran.  

Arguably, all our lives are defined by oil-- we litter it in the form of plastic, we burn it in the form of gasoline, and it's the base of the global economy.  Maybe it's high time that the world's governments and industry start portraying plastic in our oceans in the detrimental terms they use to describe oil spills?  Maybe it's time that we as a society come to fundamental grips with our consumer convenience's impact on our oceans? Everyday, every bottle cap into the ocean is like a constant disaster sized oil spill pouring out of from the ocean floor. Let's turn off the plastic spigot. In terms of the environmental impact, the product you buy isn't what's in the plastic bottle, it's the plastic bottle itself.  

On the flight home, the Sky Mall catalog of amusing products listed a "must have" item for every household - an underwater pogo stick.  It's an example of another product made from plastic, but with no post-consumer plan for recovery and use of the material it's made from.  That's dumber.

Gaviota State Beach is a small cove beach and was completely empty when I visited, late in the afternoon, threatening rain and sopping from the last storm earlier that day. A good deal of drift wood and seaweed, both of which act as a net for marine debris, made for easy collection of 39 bottle caps, remnants and ribbon from two balloons, two lighters, two shotgun shells, two small plastic bottles, one mayonnaise packet, several cap rings, a disposable plastic flosser, a rubber ball, part of a Tupperware lid, leaves from a plastic rose, a brush handle, a wing from a plastic bat, a mold for making Oreo cookies out of Playdoh, the top of a bleach bottle, a wedge of a Styrofoam plate, a red straw, a toy hippo, several plastic bottle cap rings, a lid from a plastic tub, two pieces of a Styrofoam 7-11 coffee cup and a good deal of miscellaneous plastic bits and pieces. 

Wow, this policy is the first of its kind as far as we've heard of.  Have any of our readers heard about this happening elsewhere?  Please comment.  Check full story here.

El Capitan State Beach, situated directly on the coast (away from a bay protected area) is a rocks-not-sand-beach and is a prime collection zone for marine debris from the North Pacific. I cobbled along the rocky shore in less than an hour easily filled my cloth shopping bag with a Magic Bubbles bottle, a baby bottle, a bucket handle, several pens, the handle of a toy shovel, one intact shovel, part of a tire, a third of a Frisbee, two flip-flops (unmatched pair, boo), part of a milk crate, three lighters, half of a Styrofoam plate, plastic sheeting, a gas cap, two small plastic bottles, a clip for animal tagging, a spray cap, a plastic lever, some rubber strips, a pair of sunglasses, two broken combs, very many bottle caps, and, as always, a good amount of miscellaneous consumer and industrial plastic parts.

We both remembered this one well - a deep sea fish with ferocious fangs. Frightening, if it weren't 2 inches long.

While we were there, I begged Christiana to dissect a few fish - she was more than happy to oblige. Once all the fish are sorted, she will carefully open each stomach, studying the contents for plastic ingestion. Stay tuned for the results!

This post is part of a multi-part series (see subsequent and preceding posts) -- I have been photo-documenting and collecting plastic beach debris during the 5 Gyres outreach tour along the US West Coast and into BC, Canada. In total, this will be a pictographic story of the coast through my eyes. Enjoy!

Seabright Beach, Santa Cruz CA

Since I lived in Santa Cruz for seven years, I was eager to take a new look at what the beaches actually looked like through a plastic trash-mongering lens. I was happy to see that, at the time of my visit, the beaches were relatively clean. Trash is kept away from the beaches to some extent because the region is positioned inside Monterey Bay, and the debris from the North Pacific cannot easily find its way to them.

3 Mile Beach, Santa Cruz CA

While still relatively uncontaminated because of their position along the coast, the beaches up the coast have less traffic than the beaches in town, and thus disappointingly had more plastic washed ashore that hadn’t been whisked away by beachgoers.  On 3 Mile Beach, where I used to take my dog to play in the sand dunes until I almost got a ticket from the Park Rangers (3 Mile Beach is part of Wilder Ranch State Park where dogs are not allowed) I found the usual suspects: big chunks of Styrofoam, miscellaneous heavy, industrial-type plastic tubing, bottle caps, lighters, plastic water bottles, plastic bags and remains of freed birthday balloons.

Cayucos Pier, Cayucos State Beach CA

Thank you dearly to Serena and Melia who thoughtfully helped me with this debris collection/beach cleanup. It’s always nice when you can convince your friends to pick up cigarette butts and used dental floss with you.  For whatever reason (I hesitate to give CA State Parks too much credit here), this beach was in relatively good shape when it came to plastic debris. The three of us walked half the beach for around an hour, and came up with, in total, ten chunks of Styrofoam, two shotgun shells, three bottle caps, one tube of lip gloss and one tube of chap stick, one energy drink bottle, a fifth of a Styrofoam plate, packaging for crackers, a plastic bucket handle, one plastic knife, a plastic spoon handle, a 2-oz condiment cup, a toy shovel, a preservative packet, several cigarette butts, dental floss, a fishing lure, a 1-oz vodka bottle, plastic twine, plastic-coated wire, a candy wrapper, some small parts to plastic toys I couldn’t recognize, part of a chips bag, an abundant amount of plastic straws, and a handful of miscellaneous plastic bits. In addition, we found the twist-off top to a Squeezit "juice" drink (remember those?) which, interestingly enough, have not been produced since 2001. Might sound like quite a lot, but stay tuned for upcoming posts to see what a terrible bring-down truly trashy beaches can be.

.

Glass Beach in Fort Bragg, CA is an extraordinary example of the evolution of our American throwaway culture. This unusual beach was used as the city landfill from 1941-1967, at which point the area was closed by the Water Quality Board and the landfill was relocated. Since household consumer goods were sold mostly in glass and tin (and later, steel) containers until the second half of the century, when plastics slowly entered the disposable packaging scene, what’s left of the landfill is almost exclusively glass remnants (the tin and steel has presumably eroded away). When consumer plastic was introduced to the hardworking and time-pressed families of the 1950s after the end of WWII, the plastics industry experienced an enormous post-war boom in consumer products which benefited from the new techniques developed out of necessity during the war.

Being the garbage archeo-anthropologist I’ve found myself to be, I knew I’d find this place fascinating.

It’s hard to imagine a landfill not filled with plastic, but since household garbage wasn’t dumped here much after 1967, the beach theoretically should be almost plastic-free. However, the area around Glass Beach was used as an automotive and industrial landfill until 1973, and 1967 (when the landfill was restricted to automotive and industrial use) was just around the time when disposable plastics became a mainstay in American households. I wondered if I might find a vestige of the beginnings of our throwaway plastic lifestyle here.

The beach was glimmering at first sight – the beach stones and sand are bejeweled with translucent, amber, green and blue glass worn smooth from the tides. I scooped up big handfuls of these little gemstones of our past, and if I looked hard enough, saw small scraps of tin and steel.

I explored further back against the cliffs, and after a good deal of searching, came back with some larger pieces of tin and steel, a scrap of copper, the unsafe end of a metal safety pin, a pop-top from a soda can, and the following pieces of plastic: four partial bottle caps, one intact bottle cap, one electrical outlet cover, one partial and one intact spark plug, one small wheel-type object, and 12 unidentifiable automotive or industrial plastic pieces. As you can see, the use of plastic for household consumer goods was very limited at this point, and is reflected in what remains of the waste stream history.

Before we left, Stiv and Stephen called me over to the rocky water’s edge with a remarkable discovery: bits and pieces of automotive waste were embedded directly into the rock. Innumerable white plastic spark plugs, copper coils, nuts and bolts had become part of the surrounding natural landscape of the beach.

It felt like we had found the first 20th century fossils.

You can see from this photo how time has corroded (or maintained) the different materials in use at the time. Plastic may wear down, but ultimately does not go away. Glass, made of silica, breaks into pieces and wears into smooth, small pieces. The various metals can oxidize and crumble or bend and break into smaller pieces. All of these materials, however, are inert – meaning not chemically reactive -- except plastic, which even time cannot decay.

Patricks’s Point is in Northern CA on the CA 1. We stopped to camp amongst the redwoods and walked down to the beach at sunset to walk our dog, collect and photograph beach trash. There was almost as much plastic as driftwood -- we gathered so much we weren’t able to carry it all, and ended up with little piles along the shore. Here’s a quick picture of what we amassed in about an hour. Some of the most interesting pieces found were: a toy spinning top from the Seoul, South Korea Olympic games in 1988, a pair of kids’ sunglasses that once were bright blue and missing their lenses, and the bottom half of a toy figurine.

Of what we collected at Patricks’s Point, this is all that our limited storage space in the bus allowed us to bring back. Among the selection is six shotgun shells, three toothbrushes, 14 bottle caps, eight oyster spacers, a paint brush handle, two detergent bottles, a spray paint cap, a lump of melted plastic, a margarine tub and an umbrella handle. Many of these pieces have Japanese characters on them.

It is intriguing to speculate about when and where the detritus washed ashore comes from; along the CA and OR Pacific Coast, we see a lot of South Asian junk, mostly from Japan, China and Korea. There’s no way to tell how long it’s been in the ocean, but we can reference Nikolai Maximenko’s drift buoy data which can approximate transit time across oceans. Some plastic, however, gets trapped in the gyres for a great deal longer than expected – it’s hard to imagine the extent of the plastic journey until we find something like the Korean toy top that’s likely been in the ocean for 22 years.

From the San Francisco Bay heading north along the stunning CA highway 1 on our JUNKbus tour, one of the first places we stopped was a small beach in Bodega Bay quaintly called School House Beach, which had some of the loveliest beach rocks we’d ever seen. On this small beach we collected a coat hanger, a toy horn, a popsicle handle, a flip-flop, a glow-stick, several bottle caps and some unidentifiable chunks of industrial and household plastic.

This is what we need to do to build public awareness about the global scope of the problem and begin implementing solutions to stop further harm to our oceans.

The North Atlantic Garbage Patch made it to mainstream audiences in the past two days, via an AP article that has been re-posted across the web and in several print articles, including the San Francisco Chronicle/SF Gate. Anna is quoted as saying "our job now is to let people know that plastic ocean pollution is a global problem — it unfortunately is not confined to a single patch."

Additionally, never-before published photographs appeared as a slide show today on the front page of the Huffington Post. Photos include shots of the Sea Dragon in the North Atlantic Gyre, contents of the manta trawl, crew in action collecting marine debris from the deck of the boat, and a collection of plastic marine debris collected along the expedition.

The Algarve Coast in southern Portugal is known for having some of the best waves and most beautiful beaches in Europe. It can now boast another attraction: some of the most plasticky beaches in the world, thanks to an accumulation zone caused by a system of rotating currents, including the Gulf Stream, which compose the North Atlantic Garbage Patch.

At the tail-end of the 5 Gyres expedition to the North Atlantic to study marine debris, I went on a ten day tour of Southern Portugal to photo-document beaches of the Algarve Coast and collect nurdles for Dr. Takada’s International Pellet Watch Project. The beaches, for all their international bragging rights for good waves and old-world village charm, were astonishingly trashed. The worst offenders? Derelict fishing shwag and 517 bottle caps – and just as many little blue plastic straw-type items that were afterward identified as cotton swab wands.

In total I spent a day and a half collecting trash on Praia do Amado in Carrapateira. To be honest, it was more of a voyeuristic investigation into our calamitous consumptive habits than a beach cleanup; the latter would be a wasted effort. Thanks to the Gulf Stream currents, this stuff just keeps coming back. Much of the trash on the beach was covered in barnacles and sea scum, and I could tell as soon as I picked up a blue plastic fragment or a slime-coated bottle cap that this junk was definitely cruising around the North Atlantic Gyre before landing here.

The local community, although mostly unaware of the enormity of the garbage brigadoon  off their coasts, was receptive when I talked to them about the blight on their beaches. I spoke with a local surf shop owner, Fabrice Walter from Carrapateira Surf Shop, who is interested in helping to organize community beach cleanups. (Surfrider has a chapter in Portugal but unfortunately they aren’t active in this region). While I was beachcombing, a woman walked up to me and said, “I tried to collect seashells and all I got was plastic!” As a matter of fact, she was right. Whether scanning the tide line or sifting through sand on my hands and knees, the most salient feature of this beach, rather than seashells and beach rocks, was utterly craptastic plastic.

Our friends at Team Marine, a group of eco-ambassadors from Santa Monica High School, created this awesome video on the problem of single-use plastics. Team Marine does a great job raising awareness about marine debris and the global energy and climate change crises through different service learning and community outreach projects.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AqPQkQfA_s&feature=player_embedded

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bch_MADGK6Q&feature=player_embedded

We're back in LA, after an incredible 3 week voyage across the Indian Ocean aboard the Stad Amsterdam, with scientists, filmmakers, and artists. We've now seen plastic pollution in 3 out of the 5 major subtropical gyres.

We'll be posting videos, photos, and stories over the next few weeks. Meantime, the short version: we found plastic in every one of our trawls, which became increasingly trashed as we approached Mauritius.

We collected 12 samples, and the crew will continue trawling for us on their way to Cape Town, using a high speed trawl he fashioned at sea. We call it the "Flying Dutchman".

Photo collage of marine debris washed onshore at Rincon Point, CA

Stiv and I (of 5 Gyres) are driving along the US West Coast to present findings from the N. Atlantic Gyre expedition and interview key stakeholders in the marine debris issue. We are stopping at beaches along the way from San Diego, CA to Tofino, BC to photo-document marine debris from shore, conduct beach transects and collect nurdles for International Pellet Watch. Above and below are two images of plastic trash we found and collected at Rincon Beach.

Plastic exclamation mark made out of beach debris from Rincon Point, CA

"What on EARTH is that??"

Yesterday, we found perhaps the strangest organism we've ever seen in a trawl. Wrapped around a broken plastic coffee scoop was a silvery, eel-like fish as long as a pencil, with tiny, spines lining its sinewy body. Its body shape suggested it swam vertically.

No one has any idea what it is, not even the marine scientists on board. Our resident naturalist/author Redmond O Hanlin has a very fun hypothesis, but we won't bias you with his guess yet. Can anyone out there ID this fascinating creature?

2 days from Mauritius, and we're undoubtedly seeing an increase in plastic. This morning's trawl was full of trash - a broken cup, piece of a bowl, loads of broken down plastic film, and dozens of fragments, along with 6 small triggerfish, 5 pterapods, a few pelagic crabs, a strange, broccoli-like sea plant, several halobates (marine water skeeters), and another tiny, unidentified fish, possibly related to the Sargassum fish.

By the next blog entry, we will have either spotted land or landed. An incredible voyage coming to a close - and a third oceanic gyre now explored for plastic pollution. Though our research here will end tomorrow, the Beagle crew has agreed to continue gathering samples en route to Cape Town, hopefully coming closer to the center of the gyre. We will eagerly await their findings.

(picture is small because it was sent via satellite)

After weeks of tweaking, refining, head scratching, and testing again, the high-speed trawl finally works like a charm. One of the crewmembers, Johann the Bosun took a special interest in the design, and added several key modifications – some wooden skies, a few metal fins, and a longer bridle. And now, with 4 days to go before reaching Mauritius, we have a super Macguyvered trawl fashioned from scrap material that can be towed continuously at high speeds. We call it the “Flying Dutchman”.

Yesterday, we tried our first 24-hour trawl from the side of the boat. No sooner did we toss it in, the ship’s hotel manager Martin, a 6’8 boyish blonde with twinkling blue eyes, approached us apologetically. “I’m terribly sorry, but I forgot about the trawl, and threw coffee grounds over the side of the boat!”

Sure enough, the trawl was full of grounds, with something else....a thick ring of plastic packaging, a few nurdles, dozens of plastic fragments, and a pufferfish! In its final moments, the poor puffer was likely the most caffeinated fish in the Indian Ocean. The entire crew gathered around for a look at this beautiful little creature, inflated like a miniature porcupine.

Thanks to the Flying Dutchman, Johann and his team will be able to continue collecting samples for us, between Mauritius and Cape Town. Wind permitting, they will be able to venture deeper into the gyre, And with some additional samples, we should be able to publish our findings – a first exploration of plastic pollution in the Indian Ocean.

It's always great traveling with a talented film maker with a sense of humor.  Thanks for this Mr. Atallah. 

(Above: Plastic Reef first stage)

On our recent voyage to The Atlantic Gyre, The Sea Dragon's crew consisted of not only scientists, journalists and activists, but artists as well.  We were privileged to take Belgian artist Maarten Vanden Eynde whose work with plastic is downright astonishing. Not only is Eynde an exceptionally talented artist, he's a dedicated environmentalist and a capable sailor. In college, Maarten became increasingly unhappy with the state of environmental affairs in the world and sought to build a body of work that would inform the future with positivity.

Instead of losing his mind and falling into despair over the challenges that face us as a world, Maarten developed a forward looking body of work that look at society's artifacts of now in a future perspective.  One of his latest projects which ultimately led him to cross the Atlantic with the 5 Gyres crew, is called Plastic Reef.  Maarten plans to build a ten by forty meter artificial reef system installation out of found marine plastic debris.  This is what he collected on his journey aboard Sea Dragon.  Startling, hunh? Note the objects in the photos that will give you a sense of scale.  It was great having you aboard Maarten! 

 

 

Latitude: 22 03.3 South, Longitude:91 10.9 East

With a name as beautiful as Imani, none of us quite believed we were really nearing a tropical cyclone. Nor were our weather reports conclusive – a weather fax from a Belgian crew stated “nothing to worry about”. And a wildly different report from a French ship warned of an impending hurricane.

Better safe than sorry is always the rule of thumb, so we detoured North, making a wide arc around the possible weather. The crew sprung into batten down the hatches” mode, taking down sails, putting up the small storm sail, stowing away all loose gear, and stringing up a network of thick safety lines around the entire boat. The seas continue to build unmistakably.

"Lets go watch from the bow!" Marcus and I step outside. We're immediately enveloped in a thick sauna of warm, wet air. Thankful for the safety lines, we grab ahold, clip our harnesses on, and slip slide our way to the front rails. Mountains of water, deep valleys, and howling winds replace yesterdays gentle blue tapestry. The crew now wear their waterproof foul weather gear. Less prepared, we're soaked in a matter of minutes.

Just the other month, we found ourselves sailing through hurricane conditions in the North Atlantic. Our second hurricane, in another gyre! No one is concerned, least of all our Captain. Our detour will put us far from danger, but we will be in for a ride.

22°31.39S, 91°39.93E

"Hey, there's a turtle stuck in a ball of net" someone yelled from the top of the mast, the best place to be for a 360° view of the world for miles. From 150ft up in the air came a barrage of sightings: a shark, two turtles, random large fragments of plastic floating by and one enormous ball of tangled fishing nets and rope. We're in the Indian Ocean Garbage Patch.

An oceanic garbage patch is an area of relatively dense accumulation of debris, not an island, but a thin soup that's more concentrated in the 5 subtropical gyres than surrounding waters. Other than the behemoth net ball, or trails of random debris forming wind rows, you usually will see very little with the naked eye. You detect an oceanic garbage patch when you trawl.

We've conducted 6 trawls in the last 7 days, each one with plastic debris. Trawls 1-4 had a visible fragment or two floating about. A Trawl 5 had a dozen, and trawl 6 had twice more than all others combined.

So if you hold the idea that the solution to the plastic pollution problem is to go to any of the 5 gyres and get it, you're wasting your time and money. The plastic out here will likely photo degrade and break apart into smaller and smaller fragments. After cycling through untold numbers of marine organisms through filter-feeding or food mimicry, the particles will likely sink to the seafloor, either as fish poop or become encrusted by colonizing critters. They will take their polymer chains and absorbed pollutants to the sequestering grave of deep sea mud.

Solutions to plastic pollution begin on land.

As a member of the 5 Gyres team back from an expedition to the Atlantic I'm no stranger to the horrendous fact that plastic is ending up in the marine food chain. What's really scary is that plastic works like a sponge for chemicals in the ocean--- and bad ones too-- PCBs, DDT, flame retardants, etc. But so far, I only have firsthand experience with plastic in fish. But this morning, one of my brothers in arms from the Connecticut Chapter of the Surfrider Foundation posted the above picture and this description:

"This Saturday we purchased steamers from a large, retail grocer. They were local, wild harvested. While eating one I felt something strange - I spit it out and found what turned out to be a small styrofoam ball. Assuming it was a simple mistake we continued to eat but being more careful. In the end, we found 6 clams with these styrofoam balls. At first we thought it was from shipping but upon further review these balls were in various parts of the steamers and could only get there through ingestion."

And here is what they pulled out of the clams:

from water resource angle and a plastic pollution angle. Very nice work Ms. Leonard.

24°29.25S, 98°06.39E

I was dreaming that I was sitting at a board meeting for the Algalita Foundation when suddenly someone walked into the dream-office and said “Do you want to trawl now?” Half asleep, I responded “What? Yes. Huh?” She asked again, “We can trawl now at night so you can maybe catch some fish.”  It’s 4:30am and Anna and I are zombies on deck staggering about with the manta trawl.  The crew of the 250ft. tall ship “Stad Amsterdam” are eager to see what we will find next.  “We’re only going 3 knots, so we can trawl as long as you like,” Christiana says.

Anna’s got the trawl log in hand, jotting down the starting time and latitude/longitude. I’m wearing the harness and locked into the side of the ship as we open the side gate, hang overboard with the trawl, and throw it in.

“We are approaching 5 knots,” the officer on deck says.  Moments before sunrise, we pull the trawl back onboard.  The cod end (that’s the removable sock on the end of the net) has a dozen 4-8 centimeter-long fish, like flying fish and myctophids.  We’re still far from the accumulation zone of the Indian Ocean Gyre, but there are plastic fragments here as well.

I’m reminded again that our connected oceans are a plastic soup with varying surface densities of plastic pollution.  We expected to find very little here, yet here it is. There are many people with good intentions that want to solve the problem of plastic pollution by going first to the ocean.  It is extremely impractical to start here. It must happen upstream, in the hands of those that create plastic, make plastic goods, and the customers that use them.  We need better systems for collection and containment of waste, better products with less packaging and better materials, and plastic itself should no longer be used for throw-away products.   Knowing that plastic is an environmental hazard, we must end the “Throw-Away” culture that created this mess in the first place.

Noontime position: 24 25.510 South, 99 28.891 East

A few days ago we had our first climbing lesson, to learn to scale one of the tall ships vertigo-inducing masts. 

Meanwhile, our boat is also climbing - UP the ocean. In fact, on this trip so far, we’ve already descended around 30 feet, and are now beginning to climb again, another 100 to go before reaching Mauritius. How is that possible? I wondered - isn’t sea level a more or less constant height around the world – i.e. zero?

Meet Bert Vermeersen one of the chief scientists on board, taking extremely accurate, vertical GPS measurements on sea level height. Which is apparently quite difficult to do. Bert found Marcus and me on deck early morning, struggling to do some sit ups while the boat rocked and rolled about. We quickly abandoned this exercise in futility, and chatted with Bert instead.

“Believe it or not, sea level can actually vary by as much as 300 feet around the world” Bert explained, “depending on the relative depth of the ocean, the force of gravity, and differences in topography. The earth is a flattened elipse rather than a spherical globe – equator to equator the earth is 20 miles longer than at the poles. These differences in sea level height are measured with respect to the ellipsoid.”

And so, although the indigo blue expanse surrounding us looks perfectly flat, we are slowly, gradually inching our way up a marine mountain, at a pace so slow that only Bert’s high tech measurements will notice the change.

Climbing the mast on the other hand – this is a change noticeable enough to send my heart rate soaring! After a basic safety 101 from one of the deck hands, we donned our harnesses and scampered up the mast, as we’ve been watching the crew do enviously for days. The view from atop is breathtaking. This is now a daily must!

AND THE QUEST FOR THE PERFECT HIGH SPEED TRAWL CONTINUES

For the last few days, a group of around 10 eager men, lead by Marcus and Haico, have been wrenching, bolting, testing, and retesting a space age looking steel-torpedo device, rigged with an underwater camera and a long net. I stand with Redmond O’Hanlon – the resident author on board, and watch the male tool circus unfold. He chuckles and says to me, “if you young ladies ever need to attract a man, all you need to do is drag out a wrecked car engine, leave some tools lying around, and wait for them to swarm.”

The idea was to create a high-speed trawl, with a camera that would capture footage along the way. The first try had the contraption bouncing and diving along the surface like a lovable robotic dolphin. The footage was mesmerizing – a crystalline underwater seascape – but the device still spins wildly.

And so Marcus is back in the workshop, welding another prototype. We all wait anxiously.

Still, we’ve had a chance to trawl twice so far – both times yielding a trawl full of Portuguese Man O War (ouch!) and one or two plastic fragments. We’re still far from the accumulation zone.

25°15.91S,104°53.52E

There are still 2,000 miles and two weeks between us and Mauritius, with the Indian Ocean Gyre between us. We’re working with another scientist from the University of Hawaii, Nikolai Maximenko, who has developed a computer model which predicts where plastic pollution might collect in the world’s oceans.

To create his model he took information from 12,000 drift buoys, which have already been tracked around the world. He added what is known about currents and wind to the equation. On his map of the world, he released hypothetical drift buoys evenly across every point in the sea. Amazingly, the drift buoys migrated to the 5 gyres.

We’re using the Maximenko model to plan our route through the 5 gyres. We’ve already been through the North Pacific Gyre and North Atlantic Gyre. After 500 miles in the Indian Ocean Gyre, we’ve conducted two trawls. We found plastic in each one.

26°27.21S,106]]> Stiv Wilson Sat, 20 Mar 2010 17:34:33 PDT http://5gyres.org/posts/2010/03/20/climbing_and_welding_yardarms_and_building_a_high_speed_trawl http://5gyres.org/posts/2010/03/19/5_gyres_north_atlantic_expedition_on_treehuggercom

5 Gyres got a nice little piece posted on Treehugger today with a cool picture slideshow of our voyage to The North Atlantic Garbage Patch. Click here to check it out!

Latitude: 30 04.312 S,   Longitude: 112 51.078 E

Our first 24 hours on the Indian Ocean! Neither of us can quite believe we’re here.

When the opportunity arose 2 weeks ago to join a Dutch expedition from Perth to Mauritius, leaving...immediately, we both jumped at the opportunity. All right, I admit I had a few concerns, “but we JUST got home from 2 months on the Atlantic! And what about looking for a house to live in, and I’ve missed my family, and....” But having married a perpetual adventurer, it didn’t take long for his “life is short, opportunities like this just don’t come along often” approach to rub off on me.

This is truly a once in a lifetime experience. The expedition, headed up by a Dutch production company, retraces Darwin’s route around the world. Along the way, they are producing 35 documentary films, exploring various aspects of life since Darwin – from coral reef ecology to sea level rise to plastic.

And so we find ourselves passengers on the 250-foot clipper, the Stad Amsterdam, one of the most beautiful vessels we have ever seen. She carries 50 people – scientists, filmmakers, producers, authors, and a crew of 25 in charge of sailing the boat – i.e. no night watches for us!

We had our first chance to trawl today, an unexpected surprise. We had just spent an hour in discussion with the film crew about how to balance the ships need to arrive in Mauritius on time with our interest in trawling. Slowing a boat of this size is a major undertaking, and time is of the essence.  Marcus found a workshop and welding machine on board, and may try to design a high-speed trawl. Which would be a huge help.

And then magically, the boat slowed to 3.5 knots on her own, just long enough for us to throw the manta trawl in. Here’s what we pulled up:

 

A bowl full of juvenile Portuguese Man O War, with one visible piece of plastic. Our first piece of plastic from the Indian Ocean Gyre. And not likely to be our last.

This past sunday, The 5 Gyres project was invited to present on marine debris/plastic pollution at The American Museum of Natural History in New York City. It was a tremendous opportunity for us, having some 3,000 people pass through the museum hall over the course of the day. Dr. Marcus Eriksen, Leslie Moyer and myself chatted with a very receptive crowd about the problems of marine debris/plastic pollution in our world's oceans. We showed samples we've taken from The North Pacific Garbage Patch as well as our most recent trip to the Atlantic Gyre. We also ran a children's program, where we created a sandbox for children to see what kind of plastic fragments exist on our beaches. Well, children love sandboxes and the concept worked very well as an educational tool. Big thanks to the museum's staff who made this possible. Our message is getting out there!

We trawled 15 times across the surface of the North Atlantic Gyre in the 2000 miles it took to sail from Bermuda to the Azores.  We even survived a hurricane, but still kept collecting samples.  But by March 1st we learned they were lost. The ice had certainly melted, so the fish tissues were gone.  After two weeks they appeared in LAX.  Though the fish turned into putrid soup, the plastic particles inside each sample are intact.  They are now in the Algalita lab being analyzed. 

Analysis of a gyre sample can take up to a week as lab staff manually remove and categorize each piece of plastic according to size, type and color.  In the end we'll have a good snapshot of plastic pollution in the North Atlantic Gyre.  Though others have studied the western edge of this gyre for decades, no one has ventured eastward beyond the center of the Sargasso Sea.  We did just that and found plastic debris in every trawl.

We’ve been keeping a low profile for the last week and a half. Our Atlantic gyre samples – the lifeblood of our entire expedition, went missing at the airport in Paris, in transit back to LA. To say that we are dumbfounded and devastated is an understatement. We are praying that they turn up, losing them is simply not an option.

*Giving a talk at the University of the Azores to a group of marine biology/ESL students. Later that night, we ran into a few students at a local bar, who told us how moved and shocked they were. Though they see plastic covering their beaches, most hadn’t heard about plastic in the food chain.

*Meeting with Marco Santos, a charismatic, knowledgeable PhD candidate at the University of the Azores. Marco studies threats to sea turtles posed by long lining, and plastic. Sadly, most of our video with him disappeared, but here is a fragment, featuring this juvenile brought to his office – a victim of bycatch.

*Our field trip to the local landfill. Yes, we spend our leisure time visiting dumps.... This garbage graveyard, an open pit filled with trash, stands right on coast, overlooking the Azorian blue.

cleaned recently before the storm.  

The sight of land after weeks at sea is always exciting– but arriving in the Azores is especially so. And beating the next incoming storm was an added bonus.

At around 6:00 am, we heard the loud clanging of the “land ahoy” bell – a rusty handheld bell that originally belonged to – the Sea Dragon now uses it to signal land in sight. Skipper Clive hand steered us into the harbor masterfully, reading and riding the winds so that our crew didn’t have to tack once.

And there in front of us, framed by an incredibly bright, full rainbow, the Azores – we were all silenced. A soft, green landscape disappeared up into a cloudbank, patchworked with natural hedges dividing plots of land.

Anticipating landfall elicits a range of emotions on a journey like this. We’re all eager to walk freely, sleep in a stable bed, have a cold beer and a green salad, real coffee, and exercise. Thirteen grown adults sharing a small space certainly has its moments. At the same time, there is absolutely nothing that compares to the freedom and sense of space that crossing an ocean brings. Far from our work routines, cell phones, and internet, we spend hours on deck, staring out to sea, watching the stars, and musing on life’s mysteries. We will miss these peaceful marine meditations.

We tie off in the harbor, deal with customs, and head straight for Peter’s bar, a local sailors hangout. The bar is covered with sailing memorabilia – flags from around the world, scrimshaw, and old maps. We order the aforementioned beers, salads, and cappuccinos, and toast the success of our journey.

We collected 35 surface samples total, despite hurricanes that mandated a 600-mile gap in our research. All of them contained plastic. We collected some fish – not as many as we’d hoped to based on our Pacific Trawls, but the Atlantic is new territory for us. We found one incredible fish – a trigger living in a plastic bottle - a synthetic cage.  We collected tons of debris on all three islands. And we made some tremendous connections, in Bermuda and now the Azores, to collaborate with in the future.

Now, to explore the Azores!

This trawl did not contain any sargassum.  There seemed to be more large fragments of plastic in this trawl, leading me to think that that sargassum mats floating in the North Atlantic Gyre serve a sieves for large fragments of plastic pollution.  In the absence of this floating seaweed the plastic fragments are more distributed across the sea.

We've trawled 35 times in 3,000 miles.  Tomorrow we will land on our third island in the North Atlantic Gyre.  We'll travel around the Azores to see what washes up on their shores and discover how they deal with plastic pollution.  Stay tuned...

Aside from our skipper Clive, these are the heaviest seas any of us have seen. Simple tasks – opening cans of food, making coffee, showering, cleaning the kitchen – become enormous tests of balance. And not without casualties – spills, cuts, scrapes, and an entire cup of coffee dumped on a laptop, to name a few.

But as we come up on deck this morning, we’re greeted by relatively calm seas. Back in business! Crew begin smiling again, Joel and Lam bake fresh bread, we give the boat a serious 3-hour scrub to blasting music, and finally return to collecting samples. What a difference a day makes!

We haven’t had a chance to observe the subtle changes in the oceans surface for the last few days, distracted by massive waves. We now notice: no more floating patches of Sargassum. We wonder if we’re still in the “Atlantic garbage patch”.

A quick glance at our trawl answers our question: the same collection of small plastic fragments, 3 nurdles, and a few surprises:

“Look at that! 3 Portuguese Man of War!” Marcus picks one up by its inflated air bladder, careful to avoid the deceptively alluring, still stinging tentacles. A small piece of plastic is nestled amongst the bright blue tentacles. These potent creatures are actually comprised of a colony of different polyps, each with distinct functions, that work together. A very cool, cooperative survival tactic. Just keep your distance!

We’ll trawl one more time tonight, during our 10:00 watch – our 35th and final trawl. We’re now less than 300 miles from the Azores, and beginning to reflect on the last 6 weeks. The same questions echo from friends and crew: have we found what we expected? Is this similar to what we've seen in the North Pacific? What comes next? We'll touch on some of these tomorrow, now back to research!

Two days ago we completed Trawl 33 at 28N,50W.  It was densely packed with sargassum and microplastic particles. Our two primary research goals have been accomplished. First, to document what’s floating on the sea surface in the middle of the North Atlantic Gyre.  Second, to collect enough samples to validate computer models that predict the eye of the gyre, where plastic pollution accumulates.

The next watch has taken over the helm.  We climb down from the deck soaked from seawater, while the next team ascends into chaos.  Sustained 40 knot winds create mountainous seas.  I don’t think we’ll put the trawl back in the sea anytime soon.

11:45 pm, just before midnight – Marcus, John, Mike and I are on watch from 10 till 2:00. With the moon moments from rising, the sky is still dark enough to get lost in an infinite display of stars. John snaps us out of our night-dreaming: “We’re here!!

Looking around, the view looks no different than yesterday – waves, whitecaps and wind in all directions. But we’ve just hit one of our major destination points – the center of the Sargasso Sea. According to a current modeling study by Nicolai Maximenko (LINK), this amorphous area is predicted to be the most dense accumulation zone, based on releasing drift buoys and tracking their travels. We’re hoping to see if the density of plastic in our samples fits in with this model.

But a major storm building 900 miles of us may limit our trawling time.

“Guys, this may be your last chance to trawl before the hurricane hits.” Clive, the skipper, has been poring over weather charts for hours, trying to find the best weather window for our sampling. Winds are already at 15-20 knots, but things are only going to get worse, so we go ahead, throw in our trawl, and return to star gazing for another three hours. The seas begin to rise ominously.

We’re glad we took the chance – under our headlamps, we can see a glittering of white plastic fragments nestled in the Sargassum.  We won’t know just how much though until we’re able to process these in our lab.

We haul up the trawl just in time – the winds have now picked up to a steady 25 knots. Hard to believe that early this morning, the seas were calm and glassy – the ocean is indeed unpredictable and fickle – never to be taken for granted. The power of the winds howling past our sails is tremendous, beautiful, and awe inspiring. We’re in for a few days of heavy weather!

We’re near the center of the Sargasso Sea at 28N,50W. It’s just about as far from land that you can get in the North Atlantic. Yesterday we found a windrow filled with patches of sargassum and plastic. Everything you could imagine finding in your local department store was bobbing in the sea, the EASTERN GARBAGE PATCH.

Then we came upon a bucket. Anna and John brought it aboard, only to find something violently wriggling inside. There was a trigger fish far larger than the opening of the bottle! Who know how long it had been in there, destined to be entombed there. We found plenty more pieces of plastic – toothbrush, crates, buckets, bottle caps, shoes, glove, plenty of fishing gear, and a boxing mouthpiece. “What are you going to do with the fish?” someone asked. I explained that one question we want to find out is, “Who is eating plastic bottles?” We would keep the fish for stomach analysis, but only if I promised not to waste the fillets, which we later ate for dinner. 

Trigger fish have a really bad overbite. The teeth of a trigger fish are designed for biting little things. They have small sharp teeth that can snatch a shrimp from the sargassum, or a barnacle from floating debris, or a triangular fragment off a plastic bottle. Looking closely at the bite marks on a plastic bottle, one can see two little dimples above the triangular bite. These are the two upper teeth. The lower teeth, oriented to form a sharp triangular edge, rip a fragment off the bottle. 

Though we haven’t observed this, the teeth seem to match the bite marks. There are no other fish present. I don’t think small birds or turtles have the power to be contenders for this feat either. I’m confident we’ve identified another species of fish mistaking our plastic waste for food. One more reason why we need to rethink how we use plastic.

We had just pulled in our first trawl after 48 hours of laying low due to heavy winds. We can’t sample when storm winds pummel the oceans surface – suspended plastic is so close to the buoyancy of water that the slightest disturbance nudges it below the reach of our trawl. Forced to do nothing for 2 days but tend to boat duties, read, and entertain one another, we were all starting to climb the walls. And then we spotted the windrow, flanked by a group of dolphins dancing in our wake.

Stretching far across the horizon was a long chain of floating Sargassum mats, clumped together like huge wicker doormats. Embedded in each patch was a disturbing mosaic of plastic junk. “This looks more like the Pacific gyre”, commented Joel Paschal, who has also been on several long research voyages with Captain Moore. We grabbed our nets and began fishing furiously, amassing a pile of bottlecaps, shotgun shells, crates, toothbrushes, a boxer’s mouthpiece, and myriad unidentifiable chunks floated by, gently pulsating with the ocean’s currents. 

There is no doubt in our minds that the Pacific plastic plague is not an isolated phenomenon, but an International problem. We’ve seen plastic trash covering beaches in Bermuda, carried from the mainland by the Gulf Stream. We’ve seen broken down fragments in our trawls after sieving the ocean’s surface. We’ve now seen mini “islands” of plastic trash entangled in Sargassum. And yesterday afternoon, we saw the strangest thing yet, involving a large trigger fish and a plastic bottle. But that’s a story for tomorrow.....

35 knot winds!  We pulled the 7th trawl out of the sea just in time. It's likely the last one for a couple of days, until a large low pressure system blows over us.  We're finding more plastic in every surface sample we collect.  We're heading to the center of the accumulation zone (28.5N,50W).  From there we'll turn and sail to the Azores.

We use the manta trawl to skim the surface of the sea for micro-plastics.  It’s working as expected, and the samples we're collecting look alot like samples from the North Pacific Gyre.   There are plenty of fragments of plastic in each trawl, but there’s little debris related to the fishing industry.  In the Pacific we find plenty of lost nets, line and floats.  The Atlantic Gyre appears different in this regard.

Winds are still howling.  Our skipper, Clive Crosby, works with us to find the optimal course and speed so that we can get a trawl every 100 miles or less.  Right now we’ve got the storm jib up.  We’re moving slow, maybe 4 knots.  Hopefully we’ll trawl tomorrow.

Three days, twenty-six trawls, countless pieces of plastic, and fourteen hundred miles till we reach the Azores. Though we added 4 new crewmembers in Bermuda - an increase in bodies and decrease in personal space – the additional 3 artists, filmmaker, and veteran sailor Joel Paschal are all adjusting to the unusual routine of boat life. Bursts of activity – trawling, cleaning, cooking, sailing – followed by long bouts of waiting. Staring out to sea. And catching regular sun and moon rises – here’s Stiv greeting the day with his best Titanic rendition...

Since leaving Bermuda, our trawls have looked nearly identical to those we collected on our first leg – clumps of Sargassum peppered with small particles of plastic – whites, blues, grays, and the occasional pastel. Which gives staring out to sea a bittersweet tone – in this seemingly pristine landscape, impossibly clear waters stretching thousands of miles in all directions, our random samples all contain plastic.We’re still on track with our goal of conducting a mega transect – sampling at least once every hundred miles, but the weather continues to be our wild card. After 3 dreamlike days, high winds now force us to slow down - we can’t get beyond our 100-mile limit between trawls unless we absolutely have to.

Built for speed, this slow pace is torture for the Sea Dragon. At 10-15 knots, she slices through the water gracefully, an aquatic gazelle. At our trawling speed of 2-4 knots however, she plods and heaves heavily, engine growling, stray lines clanging in protest.But we have no choice but to wait – the heavier winds churn the sea surface, pushing plastic beneath the range of our trawl. So we’ll continue to pass the hours, meditate on the seascape, entertain one another, and await the next weather forecast.

We end our first day at sea after an unbelievable 10 days in Bermuda. The island in now a distant glow on the horizon as we put the research trawl back in the water. We slow the sailboat down to 2 knots and trawl for 3 hours, skimming the surface for whatever floats. At 1:30am we pull in the net. Among the shredded plastic film, nurdles, and random pieces of plastic confetti, we’ve also nabbed a milk jug ring.

In our lectures we often talk about the impact of plastic pollution on wildlife. There is a snapping turtle named “Mae West”. When she was a hatchling she walked into a milk jug ring. As she grew she could not break this corset around her waist. Now she’s as big as a football, but with a thin waist, looking more like an hourglass. Her spine has never healed.

This is an example of two key problems to the plastic pollution issue. First, that milk jug ring is a product made to last forever, yet designed to be thrown away. Throw away plastic products, which do not biodegrade, are quickly littering our world.

Second, of the millions of products made in plastic, only a handful have a reasonable plan for recovery. Two companies, Naked Juice and Earthbound Farms, take back all of their plastic containers and will truthfully recycle them back into the original product. But millions of other products made from plastic have no post-consumer plan, so you find them on roadsides, filling landfills, washed up on beaches, and floating out to sea. WE MUST IMPROVE RECOVERY. And please remember, recovery doesn’t begin at sea. The 5 sub-tropical gyres in the world cannot be cleaned, but we can end the Throw Away culture of plastic consumption on, and improve recovery of everything else.

Jan. 29 “Not a Plastic Bag”

“Don’t touch the tentacles!” Joel warned everyone.  We’ve got a Portuguese Man of War in the net.  It has beautiful colors in shades of blue, a translucent balloon with a pink stripe across the top.  We’re seeing plenty of wildlife.  Just an hour ago two crew members spotted three whales.  Both whales and jellyfish are susceptible to ingestion and entanglement by plastic.  Baleen whales are filter feeders, and the tentacles of jellies tangle anything in their way. Anna just saw the fluke of another whale.  We’ve now been at sea for 24 hours.  A third of the crew has been sick.  We’ve completed three trawls.  And at this moment there’s still daylight while we travel 8 knots under sail power alone.

Later that morning, Jim Butterfield himself paid us a visit, and we experienced first hand his tremendous generosity.

“I watch plastic trash accumulate here in our local waters”, he mentioned, and told us about watching mini-garbage patches form right here in the harbor. An avid sailor and environmentalist, Jim has also spent time on the high seas, observing the same plastic that washes up on Bermuda beaches. When our new friend Jennifer Gray mentioned our budgetary concern with provisioning a boat for 13 people, he made an offer we couldn’t refuse:

“Come to the warehouse, give us your wish list, and anything we can’t supply, we’ll buy for you at the local supermarket”.

Francois met us at the warehouse, and spent a patient hour going over our culinary Christmas list. His only concern was supplying small amounts, “I can’t give you 2 tins of tomato sauce, but I could give you a case, will that do?”

We’re incredibly grateful for the support and kindness we’ve been shown in Bermuda, and though all are anxious to get back to boat life, we’re not in a hurry to leave the Island. Our ten days of school visits, beach cleanups, guided tours of the incinerator and recycling center, and dinner parties wrapped up tonight with a final feast at the Hog Penny – where yet another supporter Jay Nichols treated 15 of us to a last supper on stable ground.

We must give tremendous thanks to a few other people that made our stay in Bermuda enjoyable and very rewarding. Judith Landsburg and our new friends at Greenrock were always at the ready to help with our needs. Judy Clee, Bermuda’s premiere beachcomber, showed us around the island, and a visit to the Aquarium to get answers to our fish questions from local experts. The folks at Keep Bermuda Beautiful and the recycling center welcomed us with tremendous smiles and eagerly took charge of meticulous measures of plastic waste on Bermuda shores. And JP Skinner at BIOS- his patience, good spirit, knowledge and passion defines what an educator should be.

We leave Bermuda with a strong desire to return. When we do, we will have plenty of information to share about our research, and knowledge that the people of Bermuda are at the ready to take the helm to conserve and protect our shared oceans.

Some of the 5 Gyres crew went for an unassuming hike on a West Bermuda Beach. What did we find...?

Two dozen Bermudan High School teens combed Coopers Beach despite 20 knot winds and horizontal rain. “Look at the broken pieces along the high-tide line,” JP Skinner yelled over the roar of wind. JP directs the public school programs for the Bermuda Institute of Oceanographic Sciences (BIOS). Half of the kids are climbing through the high tide line pulling nets, buckets, shredded bottles and a vacuum cleaner out of the trees. In half an hour JP and the kids create a pile of trash as tall as me.

Bermuda is an island in the middle of the North Atlantic Gyre. We’ve been here for 4 days, working with groups like “Greenrock” and “Keep Bermuda Beautiful” to clean beaches and lecture about what we know about plastic. My growing impression of Bermuda is its likeness to Hawaii. Both are in the path of their respective gyre currents – North Pacific Gyre vs. North Atlantic Gyre. Both carry a burden of trash from the shores of other nations. The trash even looks the same. Nurdles are everywhere. Bottles are full of bitemarks. And plastic confetti of colored and degraded fragments litter the wrack line.

Do these clean-up efforts work? A storm is fast approaching and I can see a barnacle-covered milk crate in the surf. Where did it come from? If we pick up this one, how long till the next one arrives? It’s great to see the students getting out of the classroom to experience nature. They feel good about cleaning up this junk. That is certainly meaningful, but does the clean-up effort make a difference? I don’t think so.

I think about solutions often. Of all the plastic pollution I’ve seen in the world, on beaches, floating out to sea, piles of it burning in developing countries, bags stuck in trees or littering roadsides, what I don’t see are those plastic products that have post-consumer value. I don’t see very many plastic bottles on the streets of Los Angeles where I live, because it’s worth a nickel to 8 cents at a recovery center. But recovery centers don’t take much else.

What if all plastic waste had value? Imagine a per-pound recovery program that gave kids a buck for every pound of plastic waste they brought in, as it is for most metals? Let’s bring back the “School Paper Drive”, but for plastic. If citizens could return mixed plastic to recovery centers for a significant monetary return, then I’m certain we would see people conducting their own beach clean-ups. You wouldn’t see plastic bags in trees or plastic on roadsides. You might even see those gyre clean-up efforts actually make a few dollars by going out to sea.

The plastic industry claims its all recycleable, but unfortunately it’s not recoverable. You can’t do anything with it if you don’t have it. Voluntary recovery programs account for a small percent of the plastic we produce – less than 4%. An economic incentive to collect mixed plastic waste would work. The plastics industry could make this happen. Here’s how it works. You collect all of your plastic, all of your packaging, disposables, broken buckets, old toys, all that useless plastic stuff. Clean it, dry it, and take it to a recovery center for $ per pound. The plastics industry then deals with the material they created. It would work.

The sight of land after days of the endless seascape is always a welcome change - Bermuda particularly so. Gliding in on a serene, still Sunday, we were all silenced by the beauty of this oasis in the middle of the Atlantic. Clusters of pastel colored, stucco houses nestled on rocky outcrops, crystal clear turquoise waters, powdery white beaches tinted pink from corals - we all wondered why we haven’t heard more about Bermuda. A secret well kept by East Coasters?

We’ve been here for 5 busy days thus far, taking part in a number of educational activities organized by our tireless host Judith Landsberg, who runs local environmental charity Greenrock and is good friends with Ron and Portia from Pangaea. Thanks to Judith, we’ve been to three Beach Surveys, toured the local incinerator, will be giving a public talk tonight, speaking tomorrow at BIOS the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences, meeting tomorrow evening with the US Ambassador at the Consulate, touring a local recycling center, and speaking at a school. And then, a good 48 hours to enjoy our “honeymoon suite”, kindly provided by BIOS!

Monday morning, we joined our first cleanup at John Smith beach. Crewmember Stiv Wilson, Editor in chief of Wend magazine and rarely at a loss for words, struggled to describe the scene. “This is....unbelievable”. The array of plastic trash littering this otherwise idyllic white sand beach was so plentiful and varied that we were able to make this mosaic here from trash collected in half an hour. (2 PHOTOs- MAKING MOSAIC AND FINAL PRODUT)

On our second beach cleanup- a similar scene - we found one remarkable piece of plastic: a wad of plastic film/sheeting, with a colony of corals, Foraminifera, growing on top. Nature has a wonderful way of adapting that will hopefully supercede our efforts to destroy her...

Little or none of this trash originates in Bermuda – rather this is trash from the mainland, carried some 700 miles by the Gulf Stream, and dumped on distant shores. Frequent beach cleanups by Keep Bermuda Beautiful serve as a temporary fix and a wonderful community effort, but more plastic simply washes up the next day. This serves as a sobering reminder that the problem starts on land – and on land is where solutions must begin. We can’t sieve, net, vacuum, or cleanup all the plastic on the world’s oceans and beaches, we must move further upstream to where the problem begins.

We’ll be blogging much more frequently from now on – so stand by for a recount of our visit to Nonsuch Island and a nearby shipwreck, and our tour of Bermuda’s incinerator – where all Island Garbage is burned in a waste to energy model.

We’re reminded of Ron’s parting words – “Remember, the ocean is not your friend. Respect and enjoy her, but never forget she can turn on you....”

Just as suddenly, she turns again – the seas settle to a gentle ripple and we resume our trawling. “The calm before the storm” remarked Stiv. How right he is...A spectacular double rainbow stretches across the horizon. We reel in trawl #11 – to find the by now predictable handful of Sargassum, a few pelagic crabs, a dozen halibates (like a water skeeter, the only marine insect) and the ubiquitous plastic fragments we’ve come here to research. Though we’ve found plastic in every trawl, the pieces have been tiny, and few – nothing like the density we’ve seen in the Pacific.

And then we came across our first windrow – a series of counter currents that create a slick line of debris on the oceans surface. “A plastic bottle! No...it’s a BOOT!” Bobbing amongst a patchy line of Sargassum was a large rubber boot, covered with barnacles and algae. As our skipper Clive shifted gears to backtrack, we began spotting more and more plastic trash. “A bottle cap, another bottle cap! A roller blade wheel!” Marcus stood at the bow shouting directions to Clive, while we dashed from port to starboard with our modified pool skimmer, netting as much as we could. 45 minutes later, we’d collected some 17 bottle caps, a shotgun shell, a plastic roller ball from a deodorant stick, numerous plastic chips, several plastic milk jug rings, and finally – the boot.

After 45 minutes of conditions calm enough to explore the windrow, the winds regrouped, and we’re now slamming along over fairly rough seas – too rough unfortunately to trawl. We’re hoping for another break in the weather, to gather a few final samples before racing to Bermuda to beat a nasty storm on the horizon. Ultimately, our schedule means little – as the ocean has plans of her own. We’re pretty sure none of these plans involve choking on our plastic trash.

We left the St. Thomas yacht harbor on Friday afternoon, after several days of prepping, stowing, running errands, and squeezing in last emails while the rest of the crew arrived- nine total. Besides Marcus and me, there is Ivan Martinetti from BlueTurtle our title sponsor; Jon Howard- “JT” from Ecousable also sponsors of JUNKraft and JUNKride; Leslie Moyer, an activist and supporter from San Francisco; Stiv Wilson, CEO and editor of Wend Magazine and a phenomenal chef; Steve Amato-Salvatierra, the Sea Dragon’s intern, fresh out of high school and sailing around the world before college; and our skipper and first mate from the UK- Clive Crosby and John Wright, both exceptional sailors and exceptionally patient men.

Already, the busy yacht harbor bustling with tourists and horizon-blocking cruise liners seems far away – our only view now is 360 degrees of Caribbean blue.

After the first evenings wave of seasickness bouts – from mild nausea to hanging over the side of the boat – we’re now settling into a routine: sleep, cook, trawl, eat, clean, trawl, sleep, trawl, scan horizon for debris, trawl. Our goal is to collect at least 25 samples by the time we reach Bermuda in 8 days, and another 25 as we continue on, crossing the Atlantic to the Azores.

We pulled up trawl #1 on Saturday morning, as an eager crew clustered around the manta trawl, flip and digital cameras in hand. “Did you find anything?” asked Jon, always ready to film. After thoroughly rinsing and tossing a few handfuls of Sargassum (link to wiki/other description of Sargassum) we found a few tablespoons of planktonic organisms flecked with small plastic particles.

What at first appears a scant amount compared to our Pacific trawls is still reason to reflect: in this vast ocean, several hundred miles from the predicted accumulation zone, using a relatively tiny device – we’re finding evidence of plastic. This short clip shows how we conduct our sampling.

Other notable trawl findings: a small, translucent jelly with a chip of blue plastic in its body – an example of organisms interacting with debris; a large sheet of plastic packaging, a small piece of plastic film, two fishing floats, one plastic crate, and a partridge in a...

In four days, we hope to reach the center of the Sargasso Sea, where the plastic accumulation zone is predicted to be. Meantime, spirits are high, crew is fueled by our mission, and were constantly reminded of the tremendous support it took to get here.

I dumped all of the air from by BC and sank like a rock 70ft to the sandy seafloor, before me a living wall of corals and tropical fish. Anna’s sporting her new matching light blue fins, mask and snorkel. Every crack and crevice hides something living. The colors are spectacular and meaningful to the critter that wears them, either hiding, warning or for pure persuasion to fight or frolic. I look up at the trickle of light permitting me to see things mostly in hues of blue. “But what did this reef look like years ago?” Seasoned divers say it’s now covered with algae and nothing like it was 30 years ago. Yet my baseline is now, and it’s beautiful. So what’s missing? And does it matter?

We’re on St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands awaiting our window of departure for the first transatlantic expedition to study plastic pollution in the Sargasso Sea. There are unending little chores to prepare the Sea Dragon, a 72ft sailboat, one of 12 in the Challenge Series. We’ve made time for diving and a visit to the landfill. Approaching the hill we begin to see the manmade slopes littered with cars and tires at the base. This is where Anna and I meet Boogie. He’s been working here more than a decade.

Boogie explains that goods are imported and nothing has left, until now. “There have been cars dumped here since I was born, over 100,000 of them. They we’re all here,” he says pointing to a field nearby where he says they were stacked 50ft. high. “People don’t pay attention to where these things, all things, go. We finally found a way to recover the steel and sell it. It took an economic incentive to clean the mess, and it will take one to stop more.” But for every car there are four tires.

We drive over one hill and see a black valley. “There are one million tires there,” he says. Then he points to the bailer. There are bricks the size of Volkswagen beetles each holding 100 tires squished together. “We’ve moved 200,000 of these from St. Thomas,” Boogie says proudly. “Where they go I don’t really know for sure, but they’re not here.”

Continuing our uphill spiral we come to the top of the hill, where the juxtaposition of bulldozers squishing trash contrasts the blue skies, ocean and green hills. The growing mountain we stand on is a sandwich of new trash, sand and rock, and more new trash. Does it matter that the new version of normal, the baseline of what nature is, includes a wasteland? The human evolved aesthetic didn’t include this landscape. The human expectation for living novelty and diversity is diminished.

What we saw on the dive and in the dump are a signal that some systems are not working, and that there is a need for innovation and legislation to make it right. The solutions are there. Check out 5gyres.org to see a few. What story will we tell in 30 years? Will we reminisce or rejoice?

David told us later how stunned he was to learn about the potential scope of the plastics issue. And that he particularly enjoyed the loud sound made by the spring-loaded sediment sampling device Marcus brought it - an explosion going off. Makes me jump every time.