Water.
There are many definitions of this endless blue perfection. Serenity and calm, we're drawn to it. The Greeks believed that water drew people inward and the Chinese associated it with wisdom, flexibility, and softness. Many associate water with intuition and emotion.
For me, water is not just what we need to survive, what makes life go on; it's my passion.
I've been a marine biologist for many years and across my countless studies, I'd never seen this.
Plastic, more plastic than you could ever imagine, all floating around mindlessly.
We were in the middle of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
Located between California and Hawaii, it is the largest accumulation of ocean plastic, 1.6 million square kilometers of plastic. That's about three times the size of France, all clotted in one huge mass.
The ship slid through the plastic, the net filling up so quickly we needed to stop every few seconds to properly dispose of it.
We needed to do something. That wasn't an opinion, it was a fact. As I stood on the dock, staring out at was the ocean, my eyes couldn't find what I'd been so accustomed to seeing on the surface of the ocean, plain blue water.
It had taken me four years to convince my team to clean this mess up and two more to gather enough money to send out a boat. Generosity was found in a lot of people when you pointed out the facts. And they were simple, but much, much harder to accept.
The complete facts were verified through numerous methods, from sampling to processing to numerical model formulation to long term analysis, we found that plastics were by far the most dominant type of litter, representing 99.9% with over 668kg collected. And the scariest part is that the majority of the plastics couldn't have been sent to the ocean by the wind, some plastics dated back from the 1960's.
We've become dependent on plastic, as they render tasks easier.
"The problem of plastic waste in our environment is solvable. It requires innovation, investment, and changing the way we think about plastics and plastic waste.", said the World Plastics Council's Chairman.
