NOTE: All timestamps are in the future because WE are in the future. The care takers of Midnight Ridazz.com reserves the right to remove, edit, move or delete anything for any reason. None of the opinions expressed on these boards represent the Midnight Ridazz nor can anyone purport to speak on behalf of Midnight Ridazz.
(I know this is a bike forum, but technically this post made the minimum requirements base on our current bylaws.)
Marcus Eriksen, along with others concerned about the dire damage from debris polluting the oceans - wants to demonstrate the issue by sailing to Hawaii on a raft of plastic bottles, with a cabin crafted from the fuselage of a gutted two-seater Cessna.
Following the Hawaii trip, there will be another educational trip from Vancouver, Canada, to Mexico by , Eriksen said. That will be followed by a push to get laws enacted to ban the use of plastic disposable products, he added.
Question: Don't you think if the raft were to be lost at sea people like Jay Leno would have a lot of fun with it - to say that two guys went out to draw attention to the problem of plastics in the sea and ended up adding another 15,000 plastic bottles to the problem?
Marcus Eriksen: Well, as I've said, the risks of the raft not making it are the same as any other sailboat. But more importantly, let's look at the facts. Over 10,000 pounds of plastic trash enter the oceans every day from just the city of Los Angeles. Our raft has a total of about 350 pounds - a drop in the bucket. If adding that relatively small amount more of plastics to the oceans is enough to get the issue talked about on national television its absolutely worth it, because right now, virtually no one is giving this issue much thought. It has to start somewhere.
Your roving midnight ridazz reporter for the southland had a chance today to go checkout these guys. As you can see, they're just about ready. They still need to mount their solar panels and hook them up. Probably some other crap too. NPR was down there at the time interviewing them. They told me the show will be aired Monday.
More pics
( I couldn't help taking a pic of the trash floating around the junkraft.)
These guys were in town over the weekend. I think they mostly chilled in town on their 2000 mile JunkRide. I wish they would have done more here in the LA area since we're a source of alot of the pollution in the ocean.
What is the biggest myth about our plastic consumption?
One of the biggest plastics myths is recycling. Recycling plastic is a difficult, inefficient process, and only a small percentage of our plastics even make it to the recycling bin. Most of the plastics we dutifully place in our recycling bin are sent either to the landfill, or overseas. We’ve met now with 3 recycling centers, all of which ship their plastics to China. Some of this gets burned, some is downcycled into fake lumber, packaging or carpeting, the rest....no one seems to know. Some may get burned, or landfilled. We hope to investigate this further.
More here Another JUNKride article here Their blog
Algalita Marine Research Foundation current research going on now.click here