Three longtime fishing buddies will head to the North Pacific this summer hoping to return with an uncommon haul: a barge full of trash from one of the ocean's most polluted spots.
San Diego inventor Rich Hebert and his partners, retired metal shop teacher Roger Taylor of San Marcos and Pacific Tugboat Services owner Ted Griffith of Encinitas, will travel 1,000 miles across the ocean to the North Pacific gyre ---- a Texas-sized vortex between California and Hawaii where plastics from the world's continents have converged in a kind of "trash soup."
Scientists have said that in parts of the gyre, degraded plastic particles outnumber plankton, and abandoned fishing nets drift, accumulating flotsam.
Once they reach the gyre on Griffith's tugboat, the three partners, in cooperation with the San Francisco-based environmental organization Project Kaisei, will experiment with ways to remove debris from the ocean, creating, in effect, a marine waste management system.
They've already developed a shoreline cleanup device they call a marine debris trap, and hope to adapt the invention, along with commercial fishing gear, to skim trash from the open ocean.
"I'm not thinking we can remove every piece of plastic in the ocean, but we can get some of those materials removed and recycled," said Mary T. Crowley, founder and director of Ocean Voyages Institute and Project Kaisei, which studies marine debris and cleanup methods.
Crowley said she's "very excited" about the group's ideas for removing debris from the ocean, which has suffered for decades from the accumulation of plastic waste.
Typically, trash flowing from rivers and storm drains floats out to sea and becomes trapped in gyres, or areas between rotating currents. The North Pacific gyre is well known as the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch," a debris field of man-made waste.
Plastics don't decompose but remain suspended in the water, eventually disintegrating into smaller particles that harm fish, birds and other sea animals.
"If you take away these smaller fish because of plastic ingestion, you have implications up the food chain because you lose your prey base," said Robert Mooney, a marine biologist who is working with the three partners on a debris trap that would stop trash in waterways from entering the ocean.
Fisheries could collapse as smaller prey fish perish from eating plastics, scientists have said. Larger marine animals, such as sea turtles, birds and whales, can also become ill and die from consuming trash.
Fish contaminated by plastics may even pose health risks to humans.
"Our trash in the ocean impacts everything and has direct implications on everything from global warming to ocean acidification, environmental toxins and toxins transport," said Andrea Neal, a principal investigator for Project Kaisei and science adviser for Jean-Michel Cousteau's Ocean Futures Society, a marine education organization.
Unexpected inventor
Hebert and his partners didn't set out to clean up the ocean. A longtime angler, surfer and former tugboat captain, Hebert, 41, spent much of his life on the sea. While working at Pacific Tugboat Services with his friend Griffith, 62, he started tinkering with stretches of boom ---- floating plastic tubing ---- left over from Navy operations.
Noticing that trash seemed to collect and slide along the length of booms, he wondered whether he could devise a way to capture it. A year ago, he enlisted the help of Taylor, 67, his former metal shop teacher at San Dieguito High School, and together they produced a device he calls the marine debris trap.
The metal trap features a gate that swings open with enough wind or tide, sweeping trash into an enclosure before it shuts with the outgoing current, capturing debris in a boom enclosure.
He figured the device could help block the flow of trash from waterways and installed a test model in front of a storm drain at Pacific Tugboat Services in San Diego. The three partners applied to patent the device, formed a company called GRR ---- an amalgamation of their initials ---- and began marketing the invention this year.
"It's a passive system that works 24 hours a day, but the nice part is that Mother Nature does all the work, working with the tides and the wind," Taylor said.
In San Diego Harbor last week, one of Hebert's marine debris traps had already collected bottles and plastic scraps after 24 hours. Hebert piloted a tugboat to the spot while Taylor demonstrated how to scoop up the items with a net.
While the marine debris trap is designed to prevent trash from entering the ocean, the partners said they soon began to think about the tons of plastic already in the ocean. For Taylor, the crisis became real a couple of years ago when his fishing boat got stuck in a layer of discarded diapers and bottles in Long Beach Harbor.
"That really brought it home to me that we've got a problem," he said.
Although Hebert didn't consider himself a "green" fanatic, he had organized beach cleanups in the past and found himself brooding over reports of discarded plastic contaminating the ocean he loves.
"The news of that Pacific Garbage Patch really got you cooking, didn't it?" Taylor said to Hebert during last week's demonstration.
Hebert said he met last year with Project Kaisei officials, who invited the company to collaborate on its expedition this summer.
Project Kaisei will pay for Pacific Tugboat Services to send a 100-ton oceangoing tugboat to the gyre, and the company is donating the use of a 1,200-ton capacity barge for collecting the trash.
The team will encircle debris with fishing nets, winch the material toward the barge and scoop it on board.
Hebert is working on plans for future devices, such as an open-ocean version of the group's shoreline marine trap that would capture trash, and equipment that could process scooped-up materials at sea for use as recycled plastic on shore.
"Eventually, if it really got going, a lot of fishermen who don't fish anymore could become trash trap fishermen," he said.
Neal cautioned that scientists will have to weigh the benefits of removing trash against disruption to the marine ecosystem and the risks of removing vital nutrients along with the trash, but Crowley said it's crucial to explore those possibilities.
"What we can do and what we must do is begin to relieve the burden of all this plastic debris on the ocean ecosystem," she said.
Source: http://www.nctimes.com/news/local/sdcounty/article_343f7a18-0109-5a0e-ad4c-0181836ff6df.html
