For a couple of years now, ever since walking a deserted beach in Nicaragua with a surfboard under my arm, I’ve been obsessed with plastic debris. As a surfer and an ocean-lover in general, I felt an immense duty to get involved and try to force better policy on plastic, both locally and nationally. This beach was one of the remotest I’ve ever strolled, and instead of finding the peace and sublimity that comes from imbuing oneself in nature, I found a knee deep field of washed up plastic garbage. But why there? In a place where you can’t get to by road? Where there are no people? Well, it’s complicated. Basically, the way ocean currents work in our world makes for vast areas that are known as gyres. There are five major ones on planet earth. What creates a gyre is weather patterns where you have a prevailing wind going one direction at a higher longitude, and an opposing wind at a lower longitude. That energy transfers to the ocean, which makes for a giant spinning vortex where garbage from land (litter and watersheds) and ocean vessels collects.

LA River Plastic Debris L.A. River Plastic Debris

In the beginning of 2006, the issue of marine debris finally began to get some national press. Wend ran a story by Anna Cummins about her voyage to The North Pacific Gyre, which you can read in its entirety here. Through the process of working with Anna, we realized that we both shared a passion for working to get the word out about this environmental nightmare that is becoming worse at a truly staggering rate. Below is a model of what plastic density in the ocean will look like in the future.

Maximenko’s Plastic Pollution Growth Model from 5 Gyres on Vimeo.

Anna’s partner in crime is Dr. Marcus Eriksen, who successfully sailed a raft made of plastic bottles from Long Beach to Hawaii in the summer of 2008. The project was called Junkraft, and it was meant to bring attention to the problem. Followed up by a ‘Junkride’ from Vancover B.C. to Tijuana with presentations along the way, Anna and Marcus have brought international attention to this issue and I am truly flattered to be a part of their Atlantic team. When they stopped in Portland, my Surfrider Chapter organized an event at Keen HQ that sparked a good dialogue between the mayor’s office and Surfrider about what to do about Portland’s plastic problem. It was at that event where Anna and Marcus invited me to be part of a research expedition as part of the Five Gyres Project this January. Thanks to the generous support from The Surfrider Foundation, AQUAPAC, and over sixty private donors, I’m slated to depart January 3rd to be a part of the first real research mission to a new gyre, The Atlantic. This gyre sits between the U.S. Virgin Islands and Bermuda, in what is known as the Sargasso Sea. Working as an embedded journalist, I will be reporting for Wend, The Huffington Post Green, Treehugger and (hopefully) The New York Times. From the ship, I’ll blog via satellite nearly everyday on the Wend Greenery Blog If you’re interested in keeping up with the trip, check in there and look for Twitter updates from me, @agentstiv as well as @wendmagazine and @5gyres. Hopefully, we won’t find what we expect to find, but given the population density on the Eastern seaboard of the U.S., I think we’ll be in for a real eye-opener. Thanks again to all that sponsored me to take part in this mission. Only three gyres left to explore.