Thank goodness for the great people at Project Kaisei! They set off this week on their first expedition to the North Pacific Gyre, an area within the Pacific Ocean four times as large as Japan and filled with an estimated 4,000,000 tons of plastic.

Where did the plastic come from? Us. Humans use an estimated 85 million plastic bottles every three minutes. Then there’s the plastic bags, styrofoam cups and every other sort of plastic goods that escape into our waterways, find their way into the ocean and collect in the Plastic Vortex in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Plastic never degrades. It just accumulates and accumulates.

The 151-foot boat will set sail from San Francisco Bay to gather information about the nightmarish Plastic Vortex. Project Kaisei is ultimately determined to find ways to collect, process and recycle the plastic debris choking and killing the Pacific Ocean, all that lives there and all beings that depend on healthy oceans to survive (including us!).

In the first expedition, Project Kaisei will:

—Study and document the marine debris found in this area of the Pacific Ocean;
—Test catch methods for removing the debris;
—Conduct research on the chemical interactions of marine debris in the gyre and select fishes and wildlife related to persistent organic pollutants (POPs);
—Understand the needs required to undertake an eventual large scale clean-up of the waste material; and
—Test technologies for conversion into an economically viable by-product: diesel fuel.

If you go to www.projectkaisei.org you can sign up to receive emails tracking the research expedition. Get involved. Take the No Plastics Pledge. Support the clean up of the Plastic Vortex!