Great Pacific Garbage Patch - Research and Cleanup

Research and Cleanup

In April 2008, Richard Sundance Owen, a building contractor and scuba dive instructor, formed the Environmental Cleanup Coalition to address the issue of North Pacific pollution. ECC collaborates with other groups to identify methods to safely remove plastic and persistent organic pollutants from the oceans.

The JUNK raft project was a trans-Pacific sailing voyage from June to August 2008 made to highlight the plastic in the patch, organized by the Algalita Marine Research Foundation.

Project Kaisei is a project to study and clean up the garbage patch launched in March 2009. In August 2009, two project vessels, the New Horizon and the Kaisei, embarked on a voyage to research the patch and determine the feasibility of commercial scale collection and recycling.

The SEAPLEX expedition, a group of researchers from Scripps Institution of Oceanography, spent 19 days on the ocean in August, 2009 researching the patch. Their primary goal was to describe the abundance and distribution of plastic in the gyre in the most rigorous study to date. Researchers were also looking at the impact of plastic on mesopelagic fish, such as lanternfish. This group utilized a fully capable dedicated oceanographic research vessel, the 170 ft (52 m) long New Horizon .

In 2012 Miriam C. Goldstein, Marci Rosenberg,and Lanna Cheng write:

Plastic pollution in the form of small particles (diameter less than 5 mm)—termed ‘microplastic’—has been observed in many parts of the world ocean. They are known to interact with biota on the individual level, e.g. through ingestion, but their population-level impacts are largely unknown. One potential mechanism for microplastic-induced alteration of pelagic ecosystems is through the introduction of hard-substrate habitat to ecosystems where it is naturally rare. Here, we show that microplastic concentrations in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre (NPSG) have increased by two orders of magnitude in the past four decades, and that this increase has released the pelagic insect Halobates sericeus from substrate limitation for oviposition. High concentrations of microplastic in the NPSG resulted in a positive correlation between H. sericeus and microplastic, and an overall increase in H. sericeus egg densities. Predation on H. sericeus eggs and recent hatchlings may facilitate the transfer of energy between pelagic- and substrate-associated assemblages. The dynamics of hard-substrate-associated organisms may be important to understanding the ecological impacts of oceanic microplastic pollution.

The Goldstein et al. study compared changes in small plastic abundance between 1972-1987 and 1999-2010 by using historical samples from the Scripps Pelagic Invertebrate Collection and data from SEAPLEX, a NOAA Ship Okeanos Explorer cruise in 2010, information from the Algalita Marine Research Foundation as well as various published papers.

At TEDxDelft2012, Dutch Aerospace Engineering student Boyan Slat unveiled a concept for removing large amounts of marine debris from the 5 oceanic gyres. With his concept called 'Marine Litter Extraction', he proposes a radical clean-up that would use the surface currents to let the debris drift to specially designed arms and collection platforms. This way the operation can be so efficient that it may even be profitable. According to Boyan Slat's calculations, a gyre could realistically be cleaned up in 5 years time, collecting at least 7.25 million tons of plastic combining all gyres. He however does note that his concept would only apply for the top 2 meters, and a 'radius' of approximately 500 km, and will therefore have to be paired with 'radical plastic pollution prevention methods in order to succeed'.