5 Gyres - Understanding Plastic Pollution Through Exploration, Education, and Action

Patricks’s Point is in Northern CA on the CA 1. We stopped to camp amongst the redwoods and walked down to the beach at sunset to walk our dog, collect and photograph beach trash. There was almost as much plastic as driftwood -- we gathered so much we weren’t able to carry it all, and ended up with little piles along the shore. Here’s a quick picture of what we amassed in about an hour. Some of the most interesting pieces found were: a toy spinning top from the Seoul, South Korea Olympic games in 1988, a pair of kids’ sunglasses that once were bright blue and missing their lenses, and the bottom half of a toy figurine.

Of what we collected at Patricks’s Point, this is all that our limited storage space in the bus allowed us to bring back. Among the selection is six shotgun shells, three toothbrushes, 14 bottle caps, eight oyster spacers, a paint brush handle, two detergent bottles, a spray paint cap, a lump of melted plastic, a margarine tub and an umbrella handle. Many of these pieces have Japanese characters on them.

It is intriguing to speculate about when and where the detritus washed ashore comes from; along the CA and OR Pacific Coast, we see a lot of South Asian junk, mostly from Japan, China and Korea. There’s no way to tell how long it’s been in the ocean, but we can reference Nikolai Maximenko’s drift buoy data which can approximate transit time across oceans. Some plastic, however, gets trapped in the gyres for a great deal longer than expected – it’s hard to imagine the extent of the plastic journey until we find something like the Korean toy top that’s likely been in the ocean for 22 years.