Today is the day!

The journey begins

After months of planning and co-ordination, our team is moments away from their trip to the gyre. Filmmaker Steve Lawrence and crew have boarded the Billabong seaplane and will soon depart to the heart of the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” where they will rendezvous  with Captain Charles Moore on the research vessel Alguita. In addition to Steve and the GreenLandOceanBlue crew, a small, international consortium of concerned individuals will be departing from Oahu, Hawaii for the 4-5 hour flight. They will spend the day documenting the debris and interviewing the Alguita researchers in order to better understand the devastating effect of plastic pollution on the world’s oceans. Upon their return, the first Plastic Pacific film project will begin production!

Please bookmark www.greenlandoceanblue.com to follow our progress on Plastic Pacific and other GreenLandOceanBlue projects.

It’s on!

¡Droplets!, originally uploaded by SwitchOn.

After a few months in development limbo, the Plastic Pacific project is up and running! More details to come in the next few days, but we’re on track for a mid-September journey to the gyre!

Try to contain yourself.

walmart grocery, originally uploaded by ratterrell.

To understand why the Pacific Garbage Patch is growing by the day, we have to come to terms with the fact that the fabric of our lives is woven with plastic. Think you could go a week without plastic? Good luck getting past breakfast.

Here is the story of one woman who tried.

stuff it

plastic, originally uploaded by kay ef.

How much stuff do you really need? Where does all that stuff come from? And, most importantly, how much of this stuff winds up contaminating our environment when you’re finished with it? An answer to all those questions and more: presenting the story of stuff. Watch it here.

Paper vs. Plastic V.1

If you’re one of the millions of grocery shoppers who want to do what’s best for the environment and don’t know the best way to respond to the question “paper or plastic?”, we offer the first in a series of posts that clearly points to one answer: neither. Today’s post: A message from our good friend Ed Norton.

(Actually he’s not really a good friend, or actually a friend at all, OK, we’ve never met him, but we certainly do applaud his efforts.)

What on Earth is a nurdle?

Gyre water in jar, originally uploaded by kqedquest.

It sounds like a cuddly character from a Saturday morning kids show, or maybe a niche pasta targeted at computer geeks. Unfortunately, a nurdle is neither cute nor tasty – although there’s a good chance you may have eaten a few. Nurdles are tiny pellets of toxic-absorbing plastic that float in our oceans… and into our food chain. Read more here.

It’s called a gyre, and it rhymes with dire.

Gyre entanglement, originally uploaded by kqedquest.

A gyre is a naturally occurring vortex created by circulating water. There are five such high-pressure zones in the Earth’s oceans – in the South Pacific, the North and South Atlantic, the Indian Ocean, and the largest, The North Pacific gyre. Each of these gyres has its own version of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, created from plastic debris swirling endlessly in the currents. Together, these areas cover 40 percent of the sea. “That corresponds to a quarter of the earth’s surface,” or, as the discoverer of Garbage Patch puts it: “25 percent of our planet is a toilet that never flushes.” Read more here.