A discarded, tangled net in the Pacific Ocean. Photograph: @sea.marshall

It is difficult to look at, but the determination of this man to understand, and help us understand, this otherwise invisible impact of waste is inspiring. He could be sailing and adventuring anywhere, but chose here for a purpose. Whatever the opposite of “out of sight, out of mind” may be, he lends it credibility:

We thank him for his effort and the reminder:

Ben Lecomte is swimming through the gyre known as the Pacific trash vortex. Photograph: @osleston

Ben Lecomte is spending his summer swimming in trash – literally. So far, he’s found toothbrushes, laundry baskets, sandbox shovels and beer crates floating out in the open waters of the Pacific Ocean.

The 52-year-old Frenchman is journeying from Hawaii to San Francisco via the Great Pacific Garbage Patch to better understand how plastic is affecting our oceans. He will swim a total of 300 nautical miles, intermittently travelling by sailboat with a crew of 10 the rest of the way.

His swim will take him through a gyre known as the Pacific trash vortex, home to the largest concentration of plastic debris in the world. The distance is also a metaphorical journey for the 300m tons of plastic waste produced annually, of which an estimated 8m tons of plastic waste is pushed into the oceans.

Since starting the trip on 14 June in Hawaii, Lecomte and his crew – consisting of sailors, storytellers and scientists – have found everything from empty containers to children’s toys and abandoned fishing nets. Crew member and scientist Drew McWhirter even discovered microplastics in their dinner: upon slitting open a freshly caught mahi-mahi, he saw a piece of plastic lodged in the fish’s stomach.

“It was a very sobering experience,” Lecomte says. “Plastic trash coming back to our plates.”

The long-distance swim is the first of its kind ever to be attempted. Designed as a science-meets-adventure expedition, Lecomte and his team are collecting microplastic samples and placing GPS tags on larger floating plastic waste, so that researchers can better understand how plastics move through the oceans.

Lecomte is also on a mission to debunk the myth that the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a floating pile of plastic. There is no “trash island”, he says, but rather an “underwater smog of microplastic”…

Read the whole story here.