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Last February we posted about a “junkraft” built by Dr. Marcus Eriksen and his team of 15,000 plastic bottles, 30 sailboat masts, an airplane fuselage which they sailed 2,600 miles from Los Angeles to Hawaii to make a point about the amount of plastic polluting our oceans and contaminating our food supply.   On their voyage they sailed along the edge of the Great Pacific Vortex also known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch or simply the Plastic Vortex.

A new expedition has recently set sail to research the Plastic Vortex and the impact that it has on the oceans and on our food supply.

Expedition Sets Sail to the Great Plastic Vortex

On film, many a desert island castaway has put a message in a bottle and cast it out to sea, hoping it would someday reach land. Sorry, all you modern-day Robinson Crusoes — try that with a plastic bottle in real life, and your message will likely end up in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, bobbing in a floating collection of trash known as the Plastic Vortex. It’s an accumulation of plastic debris swept into the Pacific — whether directly from beaches or flowing out of rivers — and carried by equatorial currents into a swirling pattern to one spot between Hawaii and the mainland U.S.

On Aug. 2 and 4, two ships — the New Horizon from Scripps in San Diego, and the Kaisei from San Francisco — will depart from California for nearly monthlong missions to the vortex. The New Horizon will focus on scientific research, looking at the impact of the plastic vortex on marine life in the Pacific. As the plastic bakes in the sun, it slowly breaks down, leaching toxic chemicals into the water that may harm fish — and eventually us, when we eat them.

The Kaisei — the word means “Ocean Planet” in Japanese — will experiment with ways to clean up the debris without harming marine life in and around the vortex. People will be able to observe the progress of the mission from the project’s website, which should offer one of the first up-close views of the biggest trash heap in the world.

The Pacific vortex isn’t the only one. The Atlantic and Indian oceans, which have different current patterns, have plastic gyres of their own. Since these massive hoards of plastic come to float in international waters — and the vortexes are far from land — no government is willing to take on the expense and difficulty of cleaning them up. The best solution is simply to stop adding to them — by using less plastic and recycling it when we do. Currently, over 60 billion tons of plastic is produced each year, and less than 5% of that is every recycled. Much of what doesn’t end up in landfills finds its way eventually into the great plastic vortex.

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