On film, many a desert-island castaway has put a message in a bottle and cast it out to sea, hoping it would someday reach land. Sorry, all you modern-day Robinson Crusoes, try that with a plastic bottle in real life, and your message will probably end up in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, bobbing in a floating collection of trash known as the Plastic Vortex. It’s an accumulation of plastic debris swept into the Pacific — whether directly from beaches or flowing out of rivers — and carried by equatorial currents into a swirling pattern to one spot between Hawaii and the mainland U.S.
Plastic bags, plastic bottles, plastic toys — even last year’s Crocs — end up in the shifting vortex, which some scientists estimate to be twice the size of Texas. And as plastic use increases, especially in rapidly growing developing nations on the western end of the Pacific, that vortex will continue to grow. “It’s huge,” notes Doug Woodring, an entrepreneur and ocean conservationist in Hong Kong. But “unfortunately the ocean is a big place, and once it’s out of sight, it’s out of mind.”
