On Tuesday night I had the great honor of introducing Markus Eriksen and Anna Cummins of the Algalita Marine Research Foundation when they gave a talk at NYU.
Last summer, Markus and a colleague sailed a junk raft made from 15,000 plastic bottles from California to Honolulu in order to bring attention to the huge amount of plastic floating in a one-million square mile area known as the Pacific Gyre.
Suffice to say that the staff of Algalita have discovered that the surface of the ocean there contains six times more plastic by weight than biological matter like plankton. The plastic, it turns out, enters the ocean when it is is washed off the streets of coastal cities.
As of now, there is no technological way to clean the ocean up. The only answer is for us to stop using plastic products–especially those that are designed to be single-use, throw-away–so it doesn’t get worse.
Wondering how this affects you? Watch the very short video below. Suffice to say that, if you eat fish, you eat plastic.