Everything seems so fragile and yet it is constantly taken for granted

as we carry on with our busy lives blinded by the immediate.

As a child, I remember our waste management providers giving our family various buckets

to sort paper cardboard tin and aluminium and only the special plastics with the special numbers stamped on it.

Beside the sink is where our family's rubbish collected until there was no more counter space.

Frustrated with her four children's lack of responsibility, my mother would take it

to the overflowing buckets in the garage, where she would often forget it.

Then finally my father would get annoyed that his tools were buried and secretly,

or not so secretly, would bin the waste so it never actually made our suburban curb for collection.

This was our part.

As I've grown older, I've become very conscious of our fragile world.

But I've never thought of myself as a conservationist, a radical tree hugger,

and I've definitely never chased a rogue whaling ship, as I've never been to sea.

But somehow, after a couple drinks in San Francisco, with a very passionate friend,

I find myself in a humid port in Brazil, about to sail to South Africa as part of the 5 Gyres Institute's

expedition through the South Atlantic Gyre, documenting plastic pollution for the first time.

...um, prepare supper for eighteen hundred, and then eighteen hundred to twenty-two is wash up after supper.

And twenty-two to zero-two you can just sit and drink tea, ok? (laughter)

With regard to watches, if you can be on time, be vigilant,

keep the log, which is the log book we have to write, and stay awake.

Stiv, if you want to take care and do the anchor and get a couple of people to help you.

With an overwhelming curiosity, I am now a part of this precarious group of inspired strangers,

led by scientists Dr. Marcus Eriksen and his wife, and 5 Gyres co-founder, Anna Cummins.

We're going to head out now, ok!? We're all ready to go.

Next step, Africa.

With fresh eyes, and different networks we are brought together with simply,

to help alert the world.

What we're doing with 5 Gyres and with Algalita is simply looking at the distribution of plastic.

I mean we take a manta trawl, we skim the surface of the ocean,

we count pieces of plastic in a lab and we share the results.

The goal for trawling

is every fifty nautical miles from now until the time we get to South Africa.

In between those times, we deploy the high speed trawl.

It's a relatively new issue, this idea of plastic marine pollution.

Any sailor or navy man who was sailing through the gyre would have seen this plastic

in the last maybe thirty, forty years.

But it wasn't until Captain Moore came upon this area between Hawaii and California

full of plastic trash in an area where sailors don't traditionally go.

When you first pull up some of these samples, as you'll see,

it may not look like a lot of plastic.

You might find less than a handful sometimes only a few fragments,

sometimes it might take taking these samples back to the lab to see if theres any plastic at all.

But whats really interesting to think is here we are in the middle of nowhere

were going to be thousands of miles from the nearest land mass

and still were going to find evidence of our plastic footprint.

And, I want to remind everyone that this is our research mission.

So, I invite you all to embrace what were up to wholeheartedly get involved.

We need your help to accomplish a mission.

First trawl. Forty-nine to go...

The philosophy that there is an away,

that you know we say we throw something away.

That you can create something to be used for a minute that lasts forever,

is evil in my opinion.

What I think needs to happen with people who... companies that produce plastic is...

in the whole scope of the products impact,

they need to calculate for its environmental impact economically.

Oooh! This was the manta not the high speed so this is actually a research sample.

It's the sea-state coming down, huh?

Yeah, it was about a... it was pretty calm it was about a two or a three today.

There's a nurdle. Yep! We have nurdle!

There looks like a piece of some sort of film packaging...

Oh yeah, totally.

Hard to see against the spoon.

Today, I was introduced to a nurdle.

It might as well have been a bean bag pellet only it was a tiny piece of virgin plastic

that was found hundreds of miles off shore.

Given its seemingly insignificant size,

how can Marcus be so dedicated?

I got interested in this topic a long time ago,

when I was young, just in terms of trash debris and plastic.

Then as I got into my undergraduate and I was living in a coastal community, I started reading about marine debris in the ocean,

and I stumbled across Algalita which included Marcus Eriksen and Anna Cummins.

I started reading about the issue and got super interested and applied for graduate school.

Specifically what I study is the chemical component or the toxicity of plastic debris to organisms

So, I research the chemicals in the plastic debris either through manufacturing,

or that, adsorb or absorb onto the debris in the ocean

and so how that affects the animals in terms of does it transfer to their tissue.

And then, if so, are there toxic affects because of that?

Chelsea's work is extremely important.

What she's shown in her lab already is that pollutants will jump from plastic to fish tissue.

As bigger fish eat the smaller fish... it biomagnifies up the food chain.

Staying under?

Awesome!

This is how you make nerds happy.

So the routine begins, day and night, wind and waves, trawl in trawl out.

Our staggered shifts never quite set,

three groups rotating twenty-four hours a day.

A dinner shift previous, means a four hour watch starts sharp at 2am in a cold night.

Let's see what's in the high speed.

Ooh!

This is perfect for Chelsea's toxicity analysis.

Can I see?

You get to the middle of the ocean and you find a spoon.

Is that what that is?

Whatever it is, it's been in there for a long time.

(Heavy Wind)

Woo!!

For me, I've grown up in the ocean. The ocean has been my second home.

I've been surfing for fifteen years all over the world,

diving, sailing on the ocean, and in way, the ocean is sick

because of pollution. And, we really don't know what the extent of the problem is,

and what kind of damage is it going to take in the long term.

It's been proven that these pollutants, PCBs, DDT, other hydrophobic pollutants stick to plastic.

It's also been shown that pollutants will desorb from the plastic into the tissues of animals.

They eat it, and the pollutants pass from the plastic into their organs.

They're attracted to fats, so there's a perfect synergy for the pollutants

to pass from the plastic into the organs of the animals.

And Chelsea's now working on the next step, which is,

when fish in the open ocean eat plastic, do those pollutants desorb into their tissues?

Beautiful. Yeah!

That's a big fat sushi.

We did a really controlled study in the lab, of dietary exposure of plastic.

I fed them plastic that had been in the ocean for three months, and then plastic just straight from the factory.

And we found that they actually did eat the plastic.

We looked for toxic effects, so we found some interesting stuff with them,

where they were losing weight, some of them looked like, appeared to be anaemic.

We found some single-cell necrosis in their liver and different problems with their thyroids and so,

still working on a lot of that data, but the persistent organic pollutants that we look for in plastics that we're talking about,

they definitely have, what we call, an endocrine disrupting effects, which are problems with reproduction.

Your endocrine system is what controls all the hormones in your body.

And so some of these persistent organic pollutants basically mimic our natural hormones

and then disrupt our normal reproductive system.

I maybe thought that we used too much stuff, because I was geared towards thinking about consumerism,

but the idea of plastic never crossed my mind. I used plastic bags at the market...

You know, I used disposable coffee cups, it just, it didn't cross my consciousness.

I started years ago as a kid, sailing dinghies and always had an interest in the sea and ships and boats.

And just seeing larger chunks sailing and occasionally you come across a patch of trash and...

shit, that's not really good. But you don't realise they are little bits and

they're breaking down and it's there like on the whole.

So I got interested in this issue because I read about Captain Charles Moore

and his research that he had been doing in the North Pacific garbage patch.

He compared his findings to zooplankton

and his information came back that he had six to one ratio of plastic to zooplankton.

Now, I don't know what the negative effects of that is, but I know that it isn't right.

I've been filled with a lot of uncertainty about the trip, about the issues, about everything.

And only a few hundred miles into the four-thousand mile trek,

our main sail is completely ripped along the seams.

Again, I'm not a sailor, as my constant battle to keep my lunch down proves.

But I'm sure, this cannot be good.

The sea dragon's fuel tanks are only meant to carry us through the windless days of the gyre,

not an entire ocean.

So, what we'll to have to do, we'll just organise a sowing circle.

To be honest, don't worry, I mean it would have happened to me, it's an old sail, it's gone along the seam.

This is my second cruise, first one I went to the North Pacific,

and the north Pacific is famous for this garbage patch,

or this big island of trash floating in the middle of the ocean.

What I found when I came back is that people were wondering what was this island like?

In 2008, I had a chance with Captain Moore, and Marcus,

we'd been dating for about 6 months at that point,

so decided that a month at sea was a great way to test our relationship.

We crossed the North Pacific gyre from Hawaii back to Los Angeles,

and I still expected to see an island of garbage the size of Texas.

So, this was a real eye-opener for me, seeing that the issue is really difficult to see.

So, that inspired Marcus and I to start the 5 Gyres Institute

with a goal of expanding that research on plastic in the North Pacific,

which people are starting to know about, to all five oceans.

Everyone nowadays, wants everything instantly.

It's an instant society, gotta have it now now now now now, instant wifi, instant everything.

So everyone wants their instant coffees. No one really worries about their little plastic cups, "oh, it's only one cup."

Stuck on a boat we wait with our own set of worries.

Either we kill time sewing countless stitches, or we sit behind a computer just like at home.

With our expedition slowed with sail repairs, we distract our busy minds with familiar old habits.

Alright! Hauling in number ten!

The life cycle of a piece of plastic - it starts out with these nurdles,

or these virgin plastic pellets, and they mould it into say a plastic bottle,

then let's say the plastic bottle gets out to sea.

Plastics don't biodegrade, they photo-degrade,

which means the light breaks them down into smaller and smaller pieces,

so, once it gets out into the middle of the ocean and it's floating around with the sunlight,

the sunlight breaks it down into smaller and smaller bits.

Soon as it comes out of the river mouth or the sewage outfall pipe or whatever

and goes into the ocean, it's plastic in the ocean.

The gyres are simply just machines driven by weather

that create a circle, that collects it. Gyres are natural phenomenons.

And, beyond two hundred miles of most countries is international water, no man's land.

I'm part of a society that does not take responsibility for it's own waste.

Look at that! Woo!

Wow, that's a lot.

That looks like a nurdle, and that's a nurdle right there.

I mean, they're getting more dense.

Much more colourful, mostly white like we usually see, but...

We've got some blues, reds...

something about the colours of plastics, like there's a theory but I don't know if it's proven.

Yeah, well certain animals can be attracted to other colours.

When you look at the stomach contents of a Laysan Albatross you'll find overwhelmingly more white plastic,

and it may be because they're drawn to that colour because it's a food source, or it mimics a food source,

or because they're foragers, they're you know, they're looking for food from the surface,

and what they might spot first is white, it stands out against the colour of the ocean.

And anything with fish? Any correlation?

You know, I don't know if there's been enough research yet on ingestion.

You know, based on the ones that Charlie looked at in the North Pacific they were mostly white, it's like a food source.

And it may be more visible at night, or it may just be it looks like a fish egg or like zooplankton.