Pacific Ocean Trash Patch - Solutions in Sight?
From the Daily Sail web site: Click here to read the entire article
We scuffed through the deep trash on uninhabited Red Sea beaches and wept. We sailed garbage patches in the Indian Ocean, counting the left and right thongs to prevent ourselves from weeping. We didn’t even see the worst example of all - the North Pacific Gyre, but Ian Kiernan sailed through it, and researcher Charles Moore has been studying it for 10 years. Now a Canadian teenager has found a potential solution to the world’s monstrous plastic problem.
In every ocean there are gyres, ocean vortices caused by the rotation of the earth. The North Pacific Gyre contains the world’s worst example of pollution. Here there is a vast floating soup of plastic bags and other goods which has collected over many years because the circular current and lack of wind drives floating debris into its centre.
In addition to this swirling vortex of trash - twice the size of Texas - the UN Environment Program estimates that there are 46,000 pieces of plastic litter in every square mile of ocean…