Greenpeace ship in isles for plastic pollution awareness

The Greenpeace’s Arctic Sunrise arrived in Honolulu on Thursday morning as part of a global campaign to raise awareness about plastic pollution.

The ship, fresh from a journey through the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, where its crew collected data on microplastics found in the North Pacific Gyre, was escorted in by the Polynesian Voyaging Society’s Hokule‘a, and greeted with a traditional Hawaiian chant and ceremony.

While here for the rest of the month, Greenpeace, a global, nongovernmental environmental organization, will offer free, public tours of the ship and conduct a beach cleanup at Kahoolawe to raise awareness of plastic pollution’s threat to the world’s oceans, waterways and communities.

“We know that the Hawaiian Islands are impacted and ultimately it is up to the corporations that helped get us into this mess to take responsibility for the plastics crisis,” said David Pinsky, an oceans campaigner for Greenpeace U.S.A. “This is such a beautiful area and we want to ensure that we can help to not only protect marine life and ocean health, but also public health.”

The focus, he said, is not so much on consumer- driven actions like encouraging people to bring their own bottles and bags, but to convince corporations that produce single-use plastic products to take responsibility for them.

Only 9 percent of all plastics created have been recycled, he said, “so we can’t recycle our way out of this mess.”

On Monday, Greenpeace released the results of a global brand audit, and found that Coca-Cola, PepsiCo. and Nestle were the brands most often picked up during 239 shoreline cleanups in 42 countries spanning six continents.

Pinsky was astonished at how massive the Great Pacific Garbage Patch was, and described it as twice the size of Texas.

“Contrary to popular belief, it’s not a floating island of trash,” he said. “It’s more of a soupy mix of plastics and microplastics.”

Using a manta trawl net that can collect very fine particles, the crew collected more than 1,100 pieces of microplastic in just an hour, he said.

“It was startling to see that,” he said. “That’s what happens when larger pieces of plastics fragment into these smaller pieces, so we’re really concerned about single-use plastics because they have been created to be used for only a couple moments and then they last a lifetime.”

The crew also found fishing ropes, nets, buckets, laundry baskets, the bottom half of a Rubbermaid trash can — and floating in the middle of the ocean hundreds of miles from land — a plastic Coca Cola bottle with a red cap.

Greenpeace is collecting the data for analysis in collaboration with the University of Hawaii, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego and Ocean Voyages Institute.

Greenpeace is also partnering with the Protect Kaho‘olawe ‘Ohana and the Kaho‘olawe Island Reserve Commission to conduct a beach cleanup next week. The cleanup will include a brand audit to identify which corporations are linked to the waste.

Andre Perez, an activist with the Huli Hawai‘i Unity & Liberation Institute, will be accompanying the crew to Kahoolawe, and introducing them to the history of the island.

“Kahoolawe tends to catch a lot of the debris and it tends to build up because the island’s uninhabited, so there’s not much cleanup going on,” said Perez. “More so than that is how the island is situated between three channels. The island’s right in the middle, so it tends to catch a lot of stuff. There’s all kinds of debris out there.”

Greenpeace last came to Hawaii to raise awareness in 2010, when the group hung a banner on the Aloha Tower before the start of the Pacific Tuna Summit. Greenpeace was calling for the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission to live up to its mandate to protect the region’s tuna stocks by ending purse-seine fishing.

The ship will not be docked at Aloha Tower Marketplace, as originally announced, but at Pier 12 near the cruise ship terminal, where it will be open to the public for free tours from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturday, Sunday and Oct. 27 and 28.