California Coast & Ocean

Moore, a third-generation Long Beach resident, has been sailing the Pacific since childhood, when his father, an industrial chemist and avid sailor, took him and his siblings on voyages to remote locations. Moore did volunteer water monitoring before founding the Algalita Marine Research Foundation in 1994 to expand his efforts into ocean monitoring, research, and restoration. Over the years he had seen plastic debris in the ocean proliferate, but nothing prepared him for what he and the crew of his research vessel, the Alguita, encountered in 1997 on their way back from a Los Angeles--to-Hawaii sail race, when they decided to cross the North Pacific subtropical gyre. The plastic garbage patch they found there went on without a break for the week it took them to cross. "I knew I had to go back and quantify it," he says.

In 1999, his surveys in the gyre led him to the conclusion that plastic outweighed the zooplankton by six to one in its surface waters. After he presented the results of his study at a meeting of the American Cetacean Society in 2000, independent filmmaker Bill Macdonald, who was in the audience, approached him with a proposal to make a documentary on the subject. Our Synthetic Sea drew worldwide attention to the problem. "The study was explosive," Moore says, "and the video brought it to the attention of John Q. Public."

You Can't Vacuum the Ocean

There are pilot programs that have successfully removed large quantities of derelict fishing gear--a particular threat to marine life and habitats--from the ocean (see Coast & Ocean, Autumn 2005). But cleaning out all the plastic simply isn't possible, especially when it comes to microplastics. Moore points out that plastic is thoroughly mixed into the water column, not just floating on the surface, so even if it were physically possible to vacuum 1.3 billion cubic kilometers of water, you'd end up vacuuming out all the plankton as well.

Hauling trash out as it accumulates on beaches is one approach. In 2004, people from 88 countries around the world took part in International Coastal Cleanup Day. The first coastal cleanup day in this country took place in Oregon in 1984. In California, the Coastal Commission has organized an annual coastal cleanup day every year since 1985. It is now the largest volunteer event in the state and reaches up into the watersheds, capturing trash before it can reach the coast. In 2005, 48,250 volunteers picked up a total of 971,047 pounds of debris along 2,029 linear miles of shoreline. "We know we're getting a lot of stuff from Asia and Hawaii--areas around the Pacific Rim," says Eben Schwartz, outreach manager for the Coastal Commission. "But probably about 80 percent of it comes from inland areas."

"What beach cleanups do very well is raise awareness," Moore says. "But you can go out four days later and the tide will have deposited more trash. What we have now is a geometric increase in the amount of plastic; it's just not realistic to think you can clean it all up. Do no more harm: stop putting it in."