When it comes to ocean pollution, fishing nets are especially dangerous to marine life as they drift through the ocean, entangling whales, seals, and turtles.
In an effort to rid the ocean of this harmful marine debris, nonprofit Ocean Voyages Institute managed to pull 40 tons of abandoned fishing nets this month from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch – the largest and most famous collection of trash in the world.
To do this, mariners voyaged from Hawaii to the heart of the Pacific Ocean on a cargo sailboat, where they fished out the derelict nets from a marine gyre location where ocean currents converge between Hawaii and California during their 25-day expedition.
The cargo ship returned to Honolulu, where 2 tons of plastic trash was separated from the haul of fishing nets and donated to local artists to transform it into artwork to educate people about ocean plastic pollution. The rest of the refuse was turned over to a zero-emissions energy plant that will incinerate it and turn it into energy.
