All-female voyage to tackle plastics problem sets sail

An all-female voyage investigating the plastic pollution problem has sailed from Auckland on Thursday morning.

The ten-woman international crew departed Westhaven Marina, bound for Aotea/Great Barrier Island, the Bay of Islands, and onto Tonga aboard S/V Wind Shift – a 70-foot double-masted ketch.

The voyage is organised by UK-based non-profit eXXpedition, which leads research missions around the world. This is one of ten planned over the next 18 months – and the only one setting sail from New Zealand.

The group are conducting an ongoing global study mapping plastic pollution back to sources on land, says expedition leader Rowan Henthorn.

“We have trillions and trillions of pieces of plastic floating into our oceans, and the bad news is that it’s only increasing. Plastic production is increasing, and things like action on the Plastics Treaty has stalled,” she told RNZ’s Nine to Noon.

A special piece of kit called a Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR), will help them determine what types of plastics they find, and where they have come from.

“We put our trawl in the water, which is called a manta trawl. So, if you can imagine, it looks quite a lot like a manta ray, and it glides along the surface of the water collecting plastic fragments.

“And then we use the FTIR to analyse those plastic fragments and try and understand what items they may have come from originally.”

The idea is to trace the origin of these plastics and prevent the problem at source, something that worked well on a previous expedition in Antigua.

“We found a lot of paint and resin chips in the water. So, we were able to trace that back to the large maritime and boating industry in Antigua and the boatyards.

“It helped then to inform policy and decisions in Antigua around paint management and boat management in the boatyards.”

One of the first ports of call on this trip is Great Barrier Island.

“The way that the prevailing winds and the currents come out of the Hauraki Gulf means that a lot of the waste that is coming from Auckland actually travels through it.

“And Great Barrier Island almost acts a bit like a land net in terms of catching the items that are drifting in the currents out of the Gulf.”

The data they collect will be reported in real time on the Marine Debris Tracker and will conclude with information to help shape local waste reduction strategies.