By Leslie Guevarra
- Published on September 15, 2011 by GreenBiz
Method, the company that used green chemistry to turn age-old concepts for making and marketing soap on their head, has come up with another innovation that explodes a long-held idea - that the trash trapped in the North Pacific Gyre is unredeemable.
Working with Envision Plastics in Southern California, Method came up with a model for collecting and upcycling some of the debris that's swirling in the currents of the gyre, a swath of ocean covering 20 million square kilometers.
By some estimates, the amount of plastic awash in the ocean is twice the size of Texas and in some areas the ratio of plastic to plankton is now 10 parts of plastic to 1 part of plankton, according to Jared Blumenfeld, the head of the EPA in the Pacific Southwest.