Non-Profit Environmental Group Seeks Funding through an Indiegogo Campaign to Rid Ocean of Great Pacific Garbage Patch
Chicago, IL (PRWEB) March 03, 2014 -- The Clean Our Oceans Refuge Coalition, or COORC, has set their sights on eliminating what might be the largest collection of garbage ever assembled.
COORC’s goal is to clean up a massive collection of debris currently floating out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, or GPGP as it has come to be known, is hard to measure because its size is constantly changing, but estimates range from 270,000 square miles to more than 5.8 million miles. If left unchanged, it is believed that the GPGP could grow to be twice as large as Texas.
Cleaning up this incredibly large mess is currently COORC’s primary mission. In hope of accomplishing this feat, COORC and the Sustainable Energy Corporation have announced a new relationship with the Algalita Marine Research Institute and its founder, Captain Charles Moore. It was Moore’s research back in 1999 that started to bring more attention to the problem of pollution in our oceans. Moore found that in the area of the Pacific Ocean he studied, there was far more pollution than he or anyone else expected.
COORC and Captain Moore will be making a research voyage to the GPGP in July of 2014 as they attempt to figure out the best way to solve this problem. COORC will be helping to raise awareness for the event through a number of methods. One of the most exciting is a video stream that will be accessible in classrooms around the world. This will allow students and teachers to see the pollution and the negative effects that it is having on aquatic life
Outside of the live streaming video event, there will also be a ship-to-shore date when students will be able to ask the on-board scientists questions. In addition, COORC will help produce a documentary that will condense 15 years of Captain Moore’s research into a single movie.
The plan for COORC and Captain Moore’s expedition is to first head directly to the epicenter of the GPGP to try to get a grasp for just how large of a problem it has become. Once there, the team will spend 30 days researching the effects the pollution is having on the environment. Samples of the plastic and other debris will be analyzed and compared with other pollution to see how things have changed since Captain Moore’s initial research over a decade ago.
While this expedition is a huge step in the right direction, fixing the GPGP will not be an overnight process. COORC is fighting against one of the single largest collections of pollution the world has ever seen. While COORC has already assembled a strong team, they are looking for volunteers, researchers and donors who are ready to make a positive change for the environment and for society.
In this clean up campaign, COORC will be organizing and conducting beach cleanups on islands that are plagued with debris and plastic. While COORC continue to research and engineer technology to capture the plastic soup that swirls in the GPGP, the fantastic team of volunteers that COORC have will be participating in the clean up and we will have a Power Plant on a barge to feed the biomass and plastic into. While COORC are engineering and researching the GPGP collection system they will be focused on island cleanup and educating the Island on how to turn their plastic and garbage into alternative energy. For more information about how you can help COORC, please go to:
http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/great-pacific-garbage-patch-crisis.
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/COORC.ORG
Thomas Hirshberg, COORC, http://coorc.org, +1 (310) 984-6992 Ext: 1, [email protected]
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