Man Trying To Be 1st To Swim Across Pacific Ocean Says He Sees Floating Plastic Every 5 Minutes

Right now, French swimmer Beno?t Lecomte is in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, swimming for all he's worth.

He isn't the survivor of a plane crash or shipwreck though, he's just swimming across the entire ocean to make people remember how much plastic is in it.

Images courtesy: Seeker

At 51 years old, this isn't Lecomte's first rodeo. He's previously swum the Atlantic Ocean from Massachusetts to France in 1998; that times was to raise money for cancer research. But this year's swim is a grueling 8,851 km, from Japan to California, and he's just about crossed the 1,900 km mark. It's all worth it to him though, if it makes people sit up and take notice of the pollution we're causing.

Aside from a team of divers and medical professionals, there are also researchers accompanying Lecomte by sailboat. Whenever he stops and climbs aboard the boat for a meal or the night's rest, they study how his body is handling the situation. More importantly though, the entire time, they're also monitoring the health of the water around him, which will be used by the 27 or so research institutes he's partnered with, including NASA.

Unfortunately, it's not good news.

"We see two pieces of plastic on the surface every five minutes," Lecomte told Business Insider. The research team, who have outfitted the boat with special nets, say they're probably snagging something like four microplastics every minute along the journey.

That's scary by itself, thinking about how microplastics are reaching the middle of the ocean. But that's how currents work, carrying our pollutants out to sea along with everything else. That's what made what's known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch: about 1.8 trillion pieces of plastics, weighing an estimated 80,000 metric tons, stretching across 1.6 million square kilometres. It's a giant pile of trash that we have no idea how to fix without possibly billions spent.

"What is very surprising to me and everyone on the boat is the amount of plastic that we found, and the fact that we found it everywhere," Lecomte said in disbelief. "Every time that I am in the water, it's another opportunity for me to get the attention of or inspire people to maybe limit their use of single-use plastic."