On a sea of trash

To study the plastics in the gyre is costly and time consuming. Sailing through the region, a journey that can only be undertaken at certain times of the year, takes a full month. Eriksen and Paschal made their first gyre voyage in January, captained by Algalita founder Charles Moore, who has studied the area for more than a decade. Moore's work has shown that, in parts of the central gyre, plastics outweigh surface zooplankton 6 to 1. Put bluntly: That's more trash than life. As Moore puts it, "The constituency of ocean water has been fundamentally altered."

For many, it's hard to feel for slimy protozoans the way we do for a polar bear drifting on an orphaned block of ice. But we should. Plankton, salps, jellyfish -- these are fundamental creatures of the sea. You might say the effects of plastic flotsam are like the flotsam itself: Some are visible -- the 100,000 marine mammals killed each year, carcasses of Laysan albatross full of colored bottle tops and lighters -- but, all the more sinister, some are not.

Certain plastic resins contain potentially toxic additives, such as bisphenol A, that can leach into surrounding water. They serve as magnets for toxic substances already present in the water, such as PCBs and DDT, which accumulate as they move up the food chain. Particles of plastic also act as hosts for invasive species, carrying them to new regions of the sea, further upsetting the marine ecosystem.

About 80% of the plastic debris in the oceans gets there from land. It isn't dumped off ships. Rather, it washes from our beaches and streets and highways, through storm drains and into streams and rivers. According to a 2006 article in this newspaper, the trash that flows down the Los Angeles River each year would fill the Rose Bowl two stories high.

California's State Water Resources Control Board defines "trash" as debris that can be caught by a 5-millimeter mesh screen, but much of the plastic that enters the ocean is smaller than that. Most common are beads of polystyrene and "nurdles," pre-production plastic pellets overlooked during the manufacturing process. What's worse, in a 2005 study of local plastics industry work sites, Moore found that screens on storm drains, where present, were frequently removed during rain -- when debris moves most quickly toward the sea -- to prevent flooding. Screens are not enough. Plastic litter must be stopped at its source, not on the brink of a watershed.

Eriksen and Paschal know this, and they want you to know it too. Junk hasn't made it very far as yet, delayed by bad weather and subsequent repairs (the ocean had managed to unscrew hundreds of caps from the bottles), but now they're back on course, leaving Guadalupe Island off the coast of Baja California, and hoping that you'll tell a friend.