Somewhere in the northern Pacific Ocean, a mass of plastic is slowly rotating in a current called the North Pacific Gyre. If you could walk on this thing, you would be hiking an area equivalent to the state of Texas. It sits just below the water’s surface, evades most attempts at aerial photographic documentation (so there’s no easy way to determine its exact size), and provides a deadly buffet for confused sea life from whales to zooplankton.

It’s made up of plastic trash from the last 50 years, but it will likely be around for the next 50,000 years. The characteristics that make plastic so convenient – lightness, water-resistance, durability – are what makes it so difficult to destroy or even pin down the “great Pacific trash heap.” It’s estimated that there are now 46,000 pieces of plastic waste polluting each square mile of the world’s oceans (not including the rubber duckies, athletic shoes, traffic cones, and other flotsam frozen in polar pack ice). Marine creatures come to the surface, eat the colorful bits of plastic, and starve to death with full stomachs… because plastic can’t be digested, never leaves the animals’ systems, and isn’t too nutritious.

It’s a grim situation, unless you enjoy hunting faded plastic ducks. If you prefer to save the planet in your spare time, or if it’s your dream to start a business that will do things the green way, use the tale of the trash vortex as a jumping-off point. Brainstorm ways to track it. And most importantly, ways to get rid of it. How can we replace plastics with new, cleaner technologies? What inventions could replace plastics – and correct the impact they have on our environment? Can an entrepreneur be successful while being green?

As part of the CleanTech vertical of Global Entrepreneurship Week hopefully new creative ideas can be put forth that can help solve the problem of the ‘Bermuda Triangle of Trash,’ or decreasing one’s carbon footprint, or creating clean energy.

Tags: cleantech, environment, Verticals

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 13th, 2008 at 4:07 pm and is filed under Verticals. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.