Shaka Doug
Contributor
WARNING!, some of the images in this post are not pretty!
Hi Ohana,
I was talking with one of my dive instructor friends (Pete S.) yesterday and he told me about a project he's involved with that is having a fund raiser concert to help bring attention to the problem of plastics floating in the North Pacific Gyre, a gigantic portion of ocean just north east of us here in Hawaii.
The Sea of Trash is estimated to be bigger then the state of Texas and extends up to 10 meters in depth.
Here's a You Tube video about the situation:
Read this account of a sailor travelling through this region for the first time
I had heard of this Trash Vortex before but had never really seen much information documenting it. Well, Pete's talk opened my eyes a bit and I did some Google searching on my own and I recommend you do too. This is a huge problem and the only way anything is going to get done is to bring a lot of attention to it and pump some money into it.
The Gyre Cleanup Project will be having a benefit concert here on Maui on Saturday, January 31 at the Iao Theater in Wailuku. There will be a bunch of bands, a formal presentation on the 'Trash Island' and an art auction which will feature local artwork. The cost is a suggested $20-$25 donation. The show starts at 7:30 and will go to about 11:00.
For info about this check this website: www.gyrecleanup.org
So what do you guys know about this problem? Does anyone have any ideas on how to fix it? I do but it's no easy task and would be a project that would go on for ten to twenty years or more, possibly forever. I'd like to help out and that's why I'm bringing it up here. We're closer to it than any other people on the planet yet most of the trash came from the elsewhere on the planet. I can get flyers from Pete if you would like to promote the event let me know. It's only a couple weeks away!
Here's some powerful images of some of the stuff we're talking about. It's horrible!
Bottle caps and other plastic objects are visible inside the decomposed carcass of this Laysan albatross on Kure Atoll, which lies in a remote and virtually uninhabited region of the North Pacific. The bird probably mistook the plastics for food and ingested them while foraging for prey.
The Independent today has a piece on the Pacific trash vortex, a vast area of the North Pacific which (thanks to a current system called the North Pacific gyre) has become a floating trash dump. But not just any trash - most stuff that ends up in the oceans biodegrades or sinks long before it makes its way to the gyre. Instead, this area is full of our longest-lasting waste: plastic. An estimated 100 million tons of it, forming a soup that stretches from Hawaii to Japan.
Here's a You Tube video about the problem:
Hi Ohana,
I was talking with one of my dive instructor friends (Pete S.) yesterday and he told me about a project he's involved with that is having a fund raiser concert to help bring attention to the problem of plastics floating in the North Pacific Gyre, a gigantic portion of ocean just north east of us here in Hawaii.
The Sea of Trash is estimated to be bigger then the state of Texas and extends up to 10 meters in depth.
Here's a You Tube video about the situation:
Read this account of a sailor travelling through this region for the first time
I had heard of this Trash Vortex before but had never really seen much information documenting it. Well, Pete's talk opened my eyes a bit and I did some Google searching on my own and I recommend you do too. This is a huge problem and the only way anything is going to get done is to bring a lot of attention to it and pump some money into it.
The Gyre Cleanup Project will be having a benefit concert here on Maui on Saturday, January 31 at the Iao Theater in Wailuku. There will be a bunch of bands, a formal presentation on the 'Trash Island' and an art auction which will feature local artwork. The cost is a suggested $20-$25 donation. The show starts at 7:30 and will go to about 11:00.
For info about this check this website: www.gyrecleanup.org
So what do you guys know about this problem? Does anyone have any ideas on how to fix it? I do but it's no easy task and would be a project that would go on for ten to twenty years or more, possibly forever. I'd like to help out and that's why I'm bringing it up here. We're closer to it than any other people on the planet yet most of the trash came from the elsewhere on the planet. I can get flyers from Pete if you would like to promote the event let me know. It's only a couple weeks away!
Here's some powerful images of some of the stuff we're talking about. It's horrible!
Bottle caps and other plastic objects are visible inside the decomposed carcass of this Laysan albatross on Kure Atoll, which lies in a remote and virtually uninhabited region of the North Pacific. The bird probably mistook the plastics for food and ingested them while foraging for prey.
The Independent today has a piece on the Pacific trash vortex, a vast area of the North Pacific which (thanks to a current system called the North Pacific gyre) has become a floating trash dump. But not just any trash - most stuff that ends up in the oceans biodegrades or sinks long before it makes its way to the gyre. Instead, this area is full of our longest-lasting waste: plastic. An estimated 100 million tons of it, forming a soup that stretches from Hawaii to Japan.
Here's a You Tube video about the problem:
