Researchers Sample Enormous Oceanic Trash Vortex Ahead of Clean-up Proposal

Volunteer crews on 30 boats have been measuring the dimensions and mapping the situation of tons of plastic waste floating between the West Coast and Hawaii that in accordance with some estimates covers an space twice the dimensions of Texas.

“The vast majority of the plastic in the garbage patch is now locked up in large pieces of debris, but UV light is breaking it down into much more risky microplastics, vastly increasing the amount of microplastics over the next few decades if we don’t clean it up”, said the Ocean Cleanup’s CEO and founder Boyan Slat. “It was devastating to see”.

“I was diving in Greece and realized that there were more plastic bags than fish, and I wondered why can’t we clean this up”, Slat said.

The expedition was sponsored by The Ocean Cleanup, a corporation based by Slat, a 21-year-old innovator from the Netherlands who has envisioned utilizing long-distance floating obstacles that may connect to the seabed with an anchoring system utilized by oil-drilling rigs.

Keeping plastic out of and cleaning up the oceans is getting a lot of attention, as the effects of the pollution on marine and human life become clear. A floating barrier would prevent marine animals from getting trapped in the array.

It is backed financially by Salesforce.com’s chief executive Marc Benioff, among other philanthropic and crowdsourcing initiatives which brought in some $2.2 million, according to Ocean Cleanup.

The Pacific expedition, which will end in mid-September, will gather data that will be more extensive than what has been collected in the past 40 years. They mapped the area using aerial balloons and trawling equipment to locate samples, oceanographer Julia Reisser told Reuters. “There were hundreds of times more plastics in these areas than there were organisms”.

The 171-foot mom ship, carrying large white luggage full of plastic rubbish, returned on Sunday to San Francisco together with two crusing boats with volunteers who helped acquire the rubbish samples.

The next step will be to publish a report of the findings by mid-2016.

The next phase, planned for 2016, is the deployment in Japanese coastal waters of a 2,000-metre scale model of the group’s proposed debris collection system, which researchers believe could extend for 96 kilometres. The project plans to eventually expand all over the Pacific beginning in 2020 with a 62-mile long cleanup barrier.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch was discovered by Charles J. Moore in 1997.