The dark side of ocean cleanup technology.
Rebecca Helm despises the phrase “Great Pacific Garbage Patch.”
This moniker is used to describe the vast stretch of ocean from the west coast of North America to Japan that is crammed with an estimated 1.8 trillion pieces of trash, most of which are plastic.
“I think it’s a really awful practice to name a part of the world after something bad that’s happened to it,” says Helm, a marine biologist at Georgetown University’s Earth Commons Institute.
Moreover, she thinks that this term misleadingly implies that this area is a barren wasteland, when in fact there is a trove of marine life living alongside the floating plastic bottles, dirty fishing nets, and discarded Styrofoam cups. Along with the occasional shark or sea turtle passerby, this region—which is actually called “the North Pacific High”—hosts a unique array of tiny species that live at the sea surface, from electric-blue seadragons to minuscule