Cleaning Up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch

Mary Crowley's been sailing almost all her life, mostly with the international yacht-chartering business she ran for many years. But recently, Crowley has been traveling the high seas for a decidedly greener cause: Studying and cleaning up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

For those unfamiliar with the oceanic trash patch, here's a quick primer: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is located in the North Pacific Gyre, an area of the ocean between North America and Japan made up of large, clockwise currents. Over the years, various bits of flotsam and jetsam (much of which came from land and beach litter) have gotten stuck in the swirling currents, creating a dense plastic soup one-and-a-half times the size of the continental US. You can find a veritable hodge-podge of plastic refuse there, from bottles to lighters to bags to clothing. All that plastic and other synthetic materials is harmful to all sorts of marine life and to the humans who then eat said marine critters.

So now that you're caught up, here's where Crowley comes in. According to a story on CNN.com, Crowley founded the non-profit, Project Kaisei, in 2008 with George Orbelian and Doug Wooding. Over the past two years, the non-profit's made significant strides in studying and working to clean up the garbage patch. This summer, the non-profit collaborated with Scripps Institution of Oceanography in taking a three-week expedition to the garbage patch to conduct scientific studies. Last year, the organization collected about seven million pounds of trash around the coastline and 250,000 pounds of garbage floating in the ocean.

Crowley doesn't plan on stopping there. She hopes that future Project Kaisei expeditions will help further scientific study of the effect all that plastic has on marine and human life. She also hopes to collect more of the plastic debris and even set up a recycling project for all the trash the organization hauls in.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is literally be a huge problem, but with ambitious greenies like Crowley on the case, no task is insurmountable.

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.