Charles J. Moore

[2] In 1997, while returning to southern California after finishing the Los Angeles-to-Hawaii Transpacific sailing race, he and his crew caught sight of trash floating in the North Pacific Gyre, one of the most remote regions of the ocean.

“As I gazed from the deck at the surface of what ought to have been a pristine ocean,” Moore later wrote in an essay for Natural History, “I was confronted, as far as the eye could see, with the sight of plastic.

In the week it took to cross the subtropical high, no matter what time of day I looked, plastic debris was floating everywhere: bottles, bottle caps, wrappers, fragments.” An oceanographic colleague of Moore's dubbed this floating junk yard “the Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” and despite Moore's efforts to suggest different metaphors — “a swirling sewer,” “a superhighway of trash” connecting two “trash cemeteries” — “Garbage Patch” appears to have stuck.

Crewed by Dr. Marcus Eriksen of the Foundation, and film-maker Joel Paschal, the raft set off from Long Beach, California on 1 June 2008, arriving in Honolulu, Hawaii on 28 August 2008.

During this expedition, Moore and his crew collected plastic pollution samples across the Equatorial Currents, the South Pacific Gyre, and at various stations along the Chilean coast.