Seafaring crew hauls 96 tons of trash from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch to Sausalito

SAUSALITO (KPIX) — The pile of trash the size of Texas floating in the Pacific Ocean just got smaller.

After a 45-day trip out to the North Pacific Gyre, often referred to as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the crew from the Ocean Voyages Institute pulled 96 tons of waste out of the water.

“The ship is fully loaded, the cargo hold is full,” said Locky MacLean, the captain of the KWAI. “Over the course of a 45-day trip, 96 tons is a lot.”

The haul included a variety of types of waste, including a lot of derelict fishing equipment, household goods, single-use plastics and more.

The crew covered more than 4,600 nautical miles between San Francisco and Honolulu, picking up as much as they could along the way.

“One thing that we encountered out there was just a great amount of consumer plastics. Toothbrushes, bottle caps, all those types of things — they ended up thousands of miles out into the Pacific,” MacLean said.

On Tuesday, the crew started to unload their haul in Sausalito, with the help of the Army Corps of Engineers and other partners.

Mary Crowley, the founder and president of the Ocean Voyages Institute (OVI), says the plan is to repurpose, recycle, and upcycle everything the team pulled out of the ocean.

“Nothing will go into landfill and nothing will go back into the ocean,” she said.

She says the OVI is looking to expand its at-sea cleanup efforts.

“The health of our ocean not only influences the health of all the ocean life, but it influences our own health,” she said. “It’s a very sad and eerie feeling to be in the middle of the ocean and to see our own garbage floating out there.”

MacLean says the more plastic and waste that comes out of the ocean, the better it is for everyone and everything that shares the planet.

“This vessel and others like it could be out there for decades doing this job and keep coming back with cargo holds full of plastic for years to come,” he said. “Plastics in our oceans contribute to all kinds of nefarious things that the world would be better without. Everything from climate change to marine life being endangered, plastics don’t belong in our ocean.”

The OVI plans to do another voyage out to the garbage patch and will unload the next haul in Hawaii.