Great Pacific Garbage Patch

(Dive Travel Business News - June 8, 2011) -- Today is World Oceans Day - a time to celebrate our earth's most beautiful blue resource, and to take a moment to consider how we are taking care of it. World Oceans Day, which had been unofficially celebrated every June 8 since its original proposal in 1992 by Canada at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.  The day was officially recognized by the United Nations in 2008. Since then it has been coordinated internationally by The Ocean Project and the World Ocean Network with greater success and global participation each year. read more »

(Dive Travel Business News - March 8, 2010) -- Oceanographers report that the world's largest rubbish heap, an area of plastic debris found floating between California and Hawaii, has doubled in the past 10 years. 

The "Great Pacific Garbage Patch"  has actually expanded into two connecting areas known as the Western and Eastern Pacific Garbage Patches with the amount of debris estimated at up to 100 million tons. 

First discovered in 1997 by Charles Moore, an American oceanographer who was taking a short cut home from a Los Angeles to Hawaii yacht race, the patch threatens birds, marine life and humans alike. Moore warns that this toxic "plastic stew" will again double in size over the next decade unless consumers cut back on their use of disposable plastics. read more »