Trash researcher tallies ocean pollution
More than 5 trillion pieces of trash litter the sea surface
By Julia Rosen
Marcus Eriksen has always had a thing for trash. As a teenager in New Orleans, he literally surrounded himself with it. He liked to dumpster dive long before it became cool, spending hours at the local dump and watching a massive mechanical claw feed refuse to an incinerator.
But when Eriksen first considered dedicating his professional life to understanding global garbage and where it goes, he found few published studies.
“I could count the research papers on ocean trash on two hands,” Eriksen says. So in 2009, several years after finishing his Ph.D. in science education at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, he and his wife, Anna Cummins, founded 5 Gyres, an institute devoted to studying plastic pollution in the sea.