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.
3 comments
Comments feed for this article
September 30, 2009 at 10:23 pm
chocolatedragon
THat’s me in the black dress!
What a phenomenal experience. I can’t wait to continue to raise awareness about the plastic monster accumulating in our oceans.
I will be contacting you soon, and hope we can support each other’s environmental efforts in the future.
Keep up the amazing work- it is so important!
October 1, 2009 at 2:41 am
Amy
This is probably my complete ignorance, but why isn’t all this plastic recycled? Or is it the non-recyclable plastic?
October 1, 2009 at 3:17 am
plasticpacific
Here’s the issue: the plastic floating around in the Pacific – whether “recyclable” or not – has been pulled into this giant vortex. Many of it has been circulating for years and has degraded. However, it only degrades to a certain point, it never just disappears. So what we’re left with is a toxic soup composed largely of smaller bits of plastic (some small enough to be confused for plankton – not good.)
So it would be a hugely costly undertaking to strain all the plastic out of the water for reuse or recycling (remember, the area is at least the size of texas… and scientists are still working on an estimate for how deep it goes.)
A clean-up solution may someday arise, but for now our best defense is to find ways to reduce the amount of plastic that winds up there.