Charles Moore, who first sailed the so-called Great Pacific Garbage Patch in 1997, has returned five times over 15 years to document the concentrations of plastic in the ocean. His results show microplastics are accumulating at a rapid rate.

Plastic bottle floating in the Pacific Ocean. 

In 1997, sailboat captain Charles Moore sailed from Hawaii across the Pacific Ocean, taking a shortcut to his home port of Los Angeles after a sailing race. As he cut across the then-seldom-sailed stretch of ocean – the swirling North Pacific Gyre – he came upon an enormous accumulation of plastic trash and made it famous. He helped captured the public’s imagination around the problem of marine plastic pollution by writing about the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch.”

On Monday, two decades after his discovery, he reported a seemingly dramatic 60-fold increase in the tiny pieces of microplastic during his 15 years of study of the now-infamous ocean area. From 1999 to 2014, he and a team of researchers regularly returned to 11 sites across this area with Algalita, the nonprofit he founded, scooping up plastic samples using a manta trawl from Moore’s research catamaran in an attempt to quantify change in plastic over time. Read more

Water is the common denominator of life.

All around the world, water is a precious resource, the common denominator of life. When it’s reliable and clean, people tend to take it for granted. When it’s the opposite, it can become the crucial fact of a person’s existence, something that, if left unaddressed, prevents anything else from happening.

United States, Flint, Michigan

Roughly 2 billion people don’t have reliable sources of clean drinking water and one child every minute dies from preventable waterborne diarrheal disease. Read more

Environmental activism in China in recent years has mostly focused on air pollution.

In some of China’s cities the air tends to be filthy, while the water is clean. In the country’s rural areas, the opposite appears to be true.

According to a study reported by Chinese media, more than 80% of the water from underground wells is not safe to drink or bathe in because of heavy contamination.

An earlier report by the Ministry of Water Resources said that of 2,071 wells, nearly half had “quite poor” water quality and 36% had “extremely poor” water quality. Read more

Water is kind of a big deal

WATER. You know that thing that makes up over 60 % of your (and every other human’s) body. Not to mention that we can’t live without water for more than a week or so. So, water is kind of a big deal.

In light of World Water Day, I want to talk about some innovative ways that help people, who otherwise wouldn’t have access to safe water, access it.

While water is a big deal for all of us, it’s safe to say it’s an even bigger deal to the 750 million people around the world who don’t have access to safe water. That’s 2 and a half times the US population. Let me say that again, 2 and a half times the US population cannot access clean and safe water! Read more

A discussion on the damages of disposable water bottles and why you should get something reusable.

In 2010 I bought my first reusable water bottle.

It was big, metal and red from a Walgreens in Chicago for about six dollars, (not including taxes). I didn’t do it to save the planet, and it wasn’t to reduce waste. I hadn’t suddenly grown a conscience and decided to stop using plastic for the rest of my life.

It was convenience.

Lollapalooza was that weekend, and to my surprise they weren’t selling water anywhere in the festival. Instead, they had water bottle refilling stations everywhere. The concept was completely foreign to me. I hadn’t really thought much about reusable bottles before, but after three days of music and free water I was a convert. I brought it home and the tradition continued. In one week I said goodbye to Poland Spring, my favorite brand, and said hello to the reusable world.   Read more