The North Pacific Trash Vortex

During my daily consumption of interesting articles from Divester, I came across a piece describing a giant ‘vortex’ of plastic waste that circles around in the middle of the ocean North of Hawaii. Fascinated, I read on. Apparently the ocean currents carry the plastic waste discarded by ships and from land into a circular pattern such that this garbage accumulates and has nowhere else to go.

There are, in fact, two such vortices at work in the Pacific ocean, the other one lying just off the coast of Japan (another major producer of plastic waste on the Pacific Rim.

Continue Reading November 28th, 2006