Creative Native, Ed Jenkins, is a world-travelling photographer who has been featured in nearly every edition of Digital Wolf since the beginning. With this edition, he shares his most recent adventures, captured throughout the North Pacific Gyre.
Ocean Voyages Institute (OVI) is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization founded in 1979 by a group of international sailors, educators, and conservationists with a mission of teaching maritime arts and sciences and preserving the world’s oceans. Website: Oceanvoyagesinstitute.org
Ocean Voyages Institute in partnership with the Sailing Vessel Kwai ran a thirty five day mission to the North Pacific Gyre where we collected 67 tons of ghost nets and other plastic debris. Prior to this mission, they did a fifty day trip to the same area where they picked up 103 tons of the same debris. When we got into the gyre, we always had two crew members on top of the 60’ mast from morning until evening spotting and directing the ship to large groups of nets/trash. Everything that we brought back will be up-cycled and used in some way or another, nothing will be taken to the landfill. We had one net grouping that was estimated to weigh approximately 10 tons alone.
Every year over three hundred million tons of plastic are produced, much of it for one-time use and less than 5% of the world’s plastics are recycled. National Geographic estimates that over eighty-five million plastic bottles are used every three minutes. In many cases, plastic waste that is not incinerated or land-filled makes its way to the oceans.
Many talking points on the issue are here: https://www.oceanvoyagesinstitute.org/project-kaisei/the-problem/
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