Landfill in the Sea

LONG BEACH, Calif., March 26, 2008— -- If by chance you are missing a basketball, you may be glad to know that it has been found in the Pacific Ocean.

It was there along with giant tangles of rope, sunken snack-food bags, a plastic six-pack ring and thousands upon thousands of plastic bags, billowing under the ocean surface like jellyfish.

And that's not all.

There is a floating garbage dump about the size of Africa created by Pacific currents now carrying refuse from North America, Asia and the islands, concentrating it into a swirl of flotsam estimated to contain 3.5 million tons of junk, 80 percent of which is plastic.

Charles Moore, founder of the Algalita Marine Research Foundation, is an independently wealthy man who decided to spend his life studying the ocean. Ten years ago he was credited with discovering The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the oceanic dump of the Pacific Rim.

His organization is dedicated to restoring the marine environment. Among the many items he has pulled out of the water include: melted milk crates, a suitcase, fistfuls of toothbrushes, golf balls, glue sticks and brightly colored plastic umbrella handles.

"They are throwaway products," Moore said. "They are cheap now. An umbrella used to be something you might keep for a lifetime. Now an umbrella is for one storm."

Moore has focused his study on an area of the garbage patch that is twice the size of Texas, about a thousand miles from North America near the Hawaiian islands.

Sailing his research catamaran named the Alguita, Moore and a small crew drag a trawling device through the garbage patch to study the content of ocean water.

They find what he describes as a "plastic soup." In some cases there is more plastic in the waters than plankton, the basic food organism of the ocean.

"It has some zooplankton. But overwhelmingly what we're seeing here are plastic particles," Moore said. "The ocean has become a plastic soup. This is the soup."