Visit Sunny Chernobyl: And Other Adventures in the World's Most Polluted Places

never wore a safety harness. He knew how to furrow his brow and raise his voice and tell us that, as first mate, he was responsible for us. He had personally circumnavigated the globe in his own small sailboat at near-racing pace, sailing through every kind of sea imaginable, even surviving a rogue wave. He was equal parts Jack Sparrow and Han Solo, and we would have followed him anywhere—across the Pacific in a rowboat, up Everest in our shorts, suitless through an airlock into deep space—as long as he was there to tell us what to do. You can actually survive in deep space without a space suit, he would have explained. You just need to control your exhalations.

He promised us he would walk off the boat if it wasn’t safe, and that was good enough for us. He became our knot-tying, aggressively all-knowing weathervane. And sure enough, a new engineer was found, and a cook, and everything came together at the last minute, and finally, eventually, suddenly—we sailed.

The crew of a ship about to go out of range becomes diligent with its telephones. I texted my friends and family and posted a picture from the far side of the Golden Gate Bridge. I received one, too: my friend Victoria had gone up on the Marin Headlands to take a picture as we left. On the boat, we looked at it, the picture of ourselves. It showed the mouth of the bay, opening out from the land of the Golden Gate. Our ship was in the center of the picture, our huge steel ship, barely a dozen pixels wide, the merest smudge against the sky-colored sea.

And I talked to the Doctor one last time. She made me promise her something. She made me promise that if I found myself being washed off the ship, I would hang on.

“Promise,” she said. “Promise you’ll hang on with your last fingernail.”

Conversations about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch tend to follow a certain profile. First there is the flash of recognition, embedded with a nugget of misinformation:

Right! The giant plastic island! The one the size of Texas!

It’s not an island, you say.

Well, right, they say, moderating. It’s more of a pile.

You narrow your eyes. Seriously, how do you pile anything on the ocean?

Eventually, with coaxing, they let go of the island imagery, of impractical notions of how things pile, of Texas. Sobriety achieved, there comes the inevitable question:

Can it be cleaned up?

A lot of people have considered this question, and have debated it, and have pondered different strategies and possibilities. From this, a broad consensus has emerged among scientists and environmentalists, which I’m happy to summarize:

Get real.

We’re talking about the ocean here. Even assuming that we could just get a big net—whoever we is—and that it would be worth the massive use of fuel to drag it back and forth for thousands of miles across the Gyre, and that there would be an exit strategy for what to do with a hemisphere-size net full of trash…even granted all these impossibilities, there remains the intractable fact of the confetti.

As a plastic object spends year after year in the water, it becomes brittle from the sun. The waves begin to break it into pieces, and gradually it is delivered into smaller and smaller bits, a plastic confetti that might be the most troublesome thing about the Garbage Patch. Nets and larger objects may strangle marine life, and bottle caps and disposable cutlery may fill the stomachs of baby albatross, but the confetti has a chance of interacting with the ecosystem at a more fundamental level. Since it is consumed just as food would be, it has the potential to introduce toxins at the bottom of the food chain, toxins that may be concentrated by their passage up the chain to large animals like tuna and humans. In 2009, researchers from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (on a voyage funded in part by Project Kaisei) found plastic in the stomachs of nearly a tenth of all the fish they sampled in the Garbage Patch, and they estimated that tens of thousands of tons of plastic are consumed by fish there every year.

This is a lot like what happened in Chernobyl, where radionuclides followed the same pathways as nutrients to become incorporated into vegetation, and presumably animals. As the journalist and author Mary Mycio has written, in Chernobyl “radiation is no longer ‘on’ the zone, but ‘of’ the zone.” Perhaps we can already say the same of plastic in the oceans. It is not only a fact of life, but part of it.

How then to clean it up? To remove a billion large and tiny pieces of the ocean from itself? A cosmic coffee filter? And then, how to avoid also straining out every whale and minnow in the sea, every sprite of plankton?

It was no surprise, then, to find that organizations devoted to this issue tended to avoid the idea of cleanup. Charles Moore’s Algalita Marine Research Foundation, a leader in the budding field of Garbage Patch studies, has a bent for “citizen science” that hearkens back to science’s roots as a discipline founded by amateurs. Rather than speculate about cleanup, it produces peer-reviewed research for journals like the Marine Pollution Bulletin. Moore has been openly scornful of the idea of cleaning up marine plastic. Appearing on the Late Show with David Letterman, he swatted down his host’s hopeful questions about cleanup. “Snowball’s chance in hell,” he said. (Letterman told Moore his outlook seemed “bleak” and proposed they get a drink.) Other organizations focus on finding garbage patches in the other ocean gyres of the world or on raising awareness to combat the overuse of plastic on land.

So Project Kaisei is special. “Capturing the plastic vortex” is more than its motto. It’s a succinct mission statement. Not content to tilt at the windmill of keeping plastics out of the ocean in the first place, Kaisei has chosen to go after the biggest windmill of them all: finding some way to clean them up.

The force behind Project Kaisei is Mary Crowley, a toothy woman in late middle age with a warm smile and an unshakable belief in the possibilities of marine debris cleanup. She has gone so far as to envision ocean-borne plastic retrieval as an actual industry. “Fishing for plastics, so to speak, is not that different from fishing for fish,” she told me, leaning on the Kaisei’s starboard rail. “And unfortunately, we’ve so overfished the oceans. I think it would be a wonderful employment for fishermen to be able to get involved in ocean cleanup, and give fish a chance to have a healthier environment and restock.”

We can only hope that one day the fishing industry will be rescued by fishing for plastic instead of actual fish. (Indeed, a proposal to subsidize fishermen for debris pickup has even been floated in the EU.) In any case, let’s state for the record that in the early-twenty-first century, when most people said cleanup was impossible, Project Kaisei kept the dream alive. May they be proven prescient.

This summer’s mission, though, had been shrinking in scope almost since it was conceived. There had originally been plans for two trips, in quick succession, as well as a short press voyage that would depart from Hawaii to rendezvous with the Kaisei in the Garbage Patch. Mary had even spoken to me of tugging a barge out to the Gyre, of recruiting fishing boats to help retrieve mass quantities of refuse.

Those ideas had evaporated, and the scope of the mission had narrowed. The goal of the voyage now, Mary told me, was to use ocean-current models being developed by scientists at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and at the University of Hawaii to pinpoint the areas with the largest plastic accumulation. By comparing our observations with the scientists’ models, it would be possible to devise effective ways of finding the plastic, a critical precondition for future cleanup. Think of it as fisheries research for the seaborne trash collectors of tomorrow.

She said we would also be “working on the most effective ways to use commercial ships—tugs, barges, fishing boats—to do actual collection,” or, as a Project Kaisei press release put it, “further testing collection technologies to remove the variety of plastic debris from the ocean.”

The word further alludes to the Kaisei’s voyage of the previous summer. I heard many references to the technology developed as part of that voyage, specifically “the Beach,” a device designed to answer the intractable problem of the confetti. Passively powered by wave motion, the Beach allowed water to run over its surface, I was told, capturing the plastic confetti without the need for impractical filtering, and without catching marine life as well.

As the Golden Gate Bridge sank into the ocean behind us, Mary explained her position. She said it simply wasn’t enough to talk about stemming the flow of plastic from land. Even if we stopped the influx from the United States, there would still be plastic from the rest of the world getting into the oceans. And she had spent her entire life on and around the ocean, building a successful sail-charter business. The ocean was her life’s work. She felt she had to do something.

“So we have to work very vigorously to stop the flow,” she said. “But we also have to effect cleanup.”