*Perilous Times

Drowning in plastic: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is now nearly six
times the size of Britain.*

Huge island of rubbish floating off California

Oceanographers have found that a vast floating island of rubbish in the
Pacific has doubled over a decade and is now nearly six times the size
of Britain.

By Nick Allen in Los Angeles
Published: 7:15PM GMT 07 Mar 2010

The giant waste collection, known as the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch,"
lies between California and Hawaii and has been gradually growing for 60
years.

It contains everything from plastic bags to shampoo bottles, flip-flops,
children's toys, tyres, drink cans, Frisbees and plastic swimming pools.

Older debris has slowly broken down under the sun's rays into small
particles, which settle and are suspended just below the ocean surface.

The soupy water is heavy with toxic chemicals and the broken-down
plastic particles are now turning up inside fish. Up to 26 pieces of
plastic were recently found inside a single fish and researchers have
warned that the chemicals will work their way into the human food chain.

Beginning 500 miles off the Californian coast, the affected area, also
known as the "plastic vortex", now constitutes the world's largest heap
of rubbish.

The amount of debris is estimated at up to 100 million tons. Now there
are hopes of converting the waste into fuel. A feasibility study will be
undertaken using samples to be collected this summer.

Volunteers from Project Kaisei, a conservation project based in San
Francisco and Hong Kong, plan to send two ships into the area to bring
back some of the waste.

Doug Woodring, a member of the team, compared visiting the area to
"going into outer space".

He said: "This is the 'quiet zone' in terms of human activity because
there is no one out here working, polluting, or wasting things, yet we
have still managed to leave our mark in the form of debris."

Richard Pain, an Australian filmmaker, plans to cross the garbage patch
in a craft made of plastic bottles to raise awareness of the problem.

He said: "To the eye as you look across it, it undulates like regular
ocean. But when you look down into it, it's just plastic everywhere.
It's like soup."

The area is one of the world's five major ocean gyres -- huge systems of
rotating currents which draw in waste from thousands of miles away.

Many of the plastic items floating there carry Chinese and Japanese
writing, showing how far they have drifted on the currents.