Tall Ship Sets Sail for ‘Great Pacific Garbage Patch’

By Ryan Flinn

Aug. 4 (Bloomberg) — About two dozen researchers aboard the brigantine ship Kaisei sailed under San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge today, bound for an enormous floating mass of waste in the Pacific nicknamed “the plastic vortex.”

Little is known about what scientists term the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” except that the debris, floating about 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) off California, has grown and could be twice the size of Texas, according to the Ocean Voyages Institute, a Sausalito, California-based non-profit organization that’s backing the exploratory mission.

“The vortex is somewhat of an enigma,” said Ryan Yerkey, 35, a director of the institute and chief of operations for Project Kaisei. “It’s not the misconception that there’s a giant land bridge to China — you’re talking about something that’s very fluid and moves around in conjunction with weather systems and currents.”

The soup of trash consists of “anything that floats,” according to Yerkey, including tires, plastic bottles and toys such as dolls. Its exact size is unknown, and researchers aboard the Kaisei will sail through the trash concentration in an attempt to better gauge its mass, he said.

Recycling Garbage

The 151-foot ship will take about five days to reach the floating waste from San Francisco, and spend about two weeks studying it. The mission’s goals include exploring methods for catching debris and testing ways to recycle the garbage into a commercial product such as diesel fuel, Yerkey said.

The journey of the Kaisei, or “ocean planet” in Japanese, should last about 30 days, Yerkey said. It will be joined by another ship, the New Horizon, which departed Aug. 2 from San Diego.

The New Horizon, carrying researchers from Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, will examine how the plastic is affecting marine life, the institute said on its Web site.

The team wants a better understanding of the impact of the plastic “on the marine life that’s out there, from the little critters, even the bacteria, on up to large animals,” Robert Knox, deputy director for research at Scripps, said in an interview.

“If you’re not addressing the root cause, which is litter, you’re never going to solve the problem,” said Steve Russell, managing director of the American Chemistry Council’splastics division, which represents a dozen resin makers, including Dow Chemical Co. and DuPont Co.

The council has been promoting recycling programs around the country. Nationwide, 830 million pounds of plastic bags and film were recycled in 2007, a 27 percent increase from 2005, said Russell, 47, who is based in Arlington, Virginia.

“We shouldn’t have to be going out to the ocean to collect it,” he said. “We need to stop it from getting there in the first place.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Ryan Flinn in San Francisco at rflinn@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: August 4, 2009 20:39 EDT

taken from bloomberg.com 8-5-09