June 1, 2008 was a beautiful day in Long Beach, CA. No better day to cast off and take a 4,200 mile boat trip – approx. six-weeks – on a raft – made of plastic bottles. According to DiscoverMagazine, students from Santa Monica High School and Environmental Charter High School helped assemble the plastic bottle boat named Junk by stuffing plastic bottles into the boats six pontoons. The boat is made of 15,000 plastic bottles and 500 Nalgene bottles donated by Patagonia due to concerns over the chemicals in the bottles.

The plastic bottle raft idea came to veteran sailors Dr. Eriksen and Joel Paschal, on a boating trip in February of this year when they discovered that the quantity of trash and plastic in the ocean had increased exponentially in recent years. The plastic bottle boat is part of the Algalita Marine Research Foundations ongoing mission to alert the world to the growing problem of plastics dirtying up the ocean. During the journey on the plastic boat, Dr. Eriksen and Joel Paschal will collect ocean samples by skimming the surface with a fine, mesh net, while Eriksen’s fiancée, Anna Cummins will be the one posting photos and coordinating with the support team on land.

Be looking for this in the media. Apparently in the last few weeks prior to the launch of the plastic bottle boat Junk, the cast was filmed and interviewed for a program on the new Eco-friendly TV channel “Planet Green, as well as Mario Van Peebles’ show “Mario’s Green House”, the Sundance Channel’s “The Green” and many others. Follow the cast on their journey from their blog at www.junkraft.blogspot.com.

More on the Plastic Bottle Boat?

NPR Story

JCOnline

While on the topic, just what exactly does plastic do to our oceans and environment?

Please pardon the rather gross image. But it is sadly very common for birds, like this albatross, and other sea mammals to mistake plastics for food, and eventually starving to death.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch

The “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” or “Trash Vortex” is about 500 nautical miles off the Californian coast and is essentially a massive collection of the worlds’ trash. It is estimated that the patch holds congregates approx. 100 million tons of plastics and other debris and is believed to now be an area TWICE the size of the continental U.S..
How did it get there?

It is estimated that over 75% of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is land-based pollution. The patch is believed to have been around for over 2o years and is located in the North Pacific Gyre, a relatively stationary region of the North Pacific Ocean. The circular rotation of that area of the ocean draws the waste material in and is as concentrated as one million pieces of plastic per square mile in some areas.

What does the Great Pacific Garbage Patch look like? Plastic soup. Miriam Goldsten from the Oyster’s Garter wrote a great explanation –

“The most common misconception is that the trash pile is like an island, or a dense pile. It’s not packed in as tight as that - it’s more like a dense collection of tiny floating pieces of plastic, most of which are not on the surface. A big container ship or naval vessel going through there would probably not notice much out of the ordinary - after all, there is some degree of plastic trash floating on the surface all over the world.

To really get a sense of how much plastic is in there, you have to do a trawl, which entails dragging a net with a bucket on the end behind your boat. Here’s a photo of a bongo trawl taken off of southern California. (Thanks, Barbeau lab! SIO power!) And here’s a photo of what a normal bongo trawl should produce - lots of zooplankton, a few invertebrates, and the occasional small fish.

Now, contrast this with the results of a trawl from the North Pacific Gyre. Here’s the bongo net being hauled up - see how the ocean looks normal? But the contents - plastic, plastic, and more plastic.* When all that plastic collects somewhere, you get beaches like the one below in the NW Hawaiian Islands.”