Scientists and volunteers who have spent the last month gathering data on how much plastic garbage is floating in the Pacific Ocean have returned to San Francisco and said most of the trash they found is medium to large-sized pieces, as opposed to tiny ones.
Volunteer crews on 30 boats have been measuring the size and mapping the location of tonnes of plastic waste floating between the West Coast and Hawaii.
“It was a good illustration of why it is such an urgent thing to clean up because if we don’t clean it up soon then we’ll give the big plastic time to break into smaller and smaller pieces,” said Boyan Slat, who has developed a technology that he says can start removing the garbage by 2020.
A ship carrying fishing nets, buckets, buoys and bottles, among other items, and two sailing boats with volunteers who helped collect the garbage samples arrived in San Francisco on Sunday.
The boats went on a 30-day voyage as part of the “Mega Expedition,” a major step in an effort to eventually clean up what’s known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
The expedition was sponsored by The Ocean Cleanup, an organisation founded by Slat, a 21-year-old innovator from the Netherlands.