Liz Baylis

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…

Click here to read the entire article

From “Sailing Scuttlebutt” VIDEO OF THE WEEK:

In order to draw attention to the other masses of recyclables now floating in the pacific, Dr. Marcus Eriksen and Joel Paschal departed Sunday, June 1, 2008 from Long Beach, California on a raft made mostly of plastic bottles - 15,000 plastic bottles - topped by the fuselage of an old private airplane. Marcus and Joel hope to sail their raft all the way to Hawaii in order to help call attention to the problem of plastic pollution in the oceans. The raft is 30 feet by 20 feet, consisting of thousands of plastic bottles bound together with fishing net into “pontoons,” and then set in a deck/framework of old aluminum spars. The “cockpit” of the raft, which will provide shelter for the two man crew, is an old airplane fuselage, which the team overhauled and “made waterproof.” They expect to make landfall in six weeks, but are carrying provisions for three months.

Click here for this week’s video:
http://www.sailingscuttlebutt.com/media/08/0602