Ed Cumming

Telegraph (UK), March 16, 2010

The world’s biggest rubbish dump keeps growing. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch – or the Pacific Trash Vortex – is a floating monument to our culture of waste, the final resting place of every forgotten carrier bag, every discarded bottle and every piece of packaging blown away in the wind. Opinions about the exact size of this great, soupy mix vary, but some claim it has doubled over the past decade, making it now six times the size of the UK.

Dr Simon Boxall, a physical oceanographer at the National Oceanography Centre at the University of Southampton, goes even further: “It’s the size of North America. But although the patch itself is extremely large, it’s only one very clear representation of the much bigger worldwide problem.”

This global problem is the motive behind the Plastiki, a 60ft, 12-ton catamaran built from 12,500 recycled plastic bottles, which embarks on its maiden voyage from San Francisco this week. The brainchild of David de Rothschild, the flamboyant British banking heir and environmentalist, the Plastiki will sail right through the middle of the Garbage Patch as part of a campaign to help make more people aware of the Pacific’s threatened communities and of the damage our waste is doing to our oceans.