The plastic bag is highly over specified for the job for which it was designed. Required to serve us for the hour or two it takes us to get our shopping home instead it is expected that the bags will last for hundreds of years. The hazards of the plastic bag do not stop with the turtles. Plastics never fully degrade; plastic bags eventually turn into plastic “dust” which can still be ingested by filter feeding marine animals. Plastic is highly toxic, and toxins in filter feeders are passed up the food chain to the fish and ultimately human consumers.

 Until now, no studies were conducted on filter-feeding organisms such as jellies, whose feeding mechanisms do not permit them to distinguish between tiny fragments of plastic debris and plankton, and no studies to assess potential effects on these filter-feeders. It is now known that plastic fragments heavily impact these creatures. When broken into smaller pieces, these tiny plastic fragments accumulate non-water soluble toxicants such as PCB's, and pesticides such as DDT.

Plastic polymers, or tiny plastic resin pellets act as sponges for these chemicals and other persistent organic pollutants, concentrating such poisons up to one million times higher than their concentration in the water as free floating subs. These toxic particles move up the food chain form the small invertebrates and then to fish and then return to us on our plate!

In May 2009 the heir to one of the world's greatest fortunes, David de Rothschild, will set sail across the Pacific - in a boat, the Plastiki, made from plastic bottles and recycled waste. The aim of this extraordinary venture is simple: to focus attention on one of this the world's strangest and most unpleasant environmental phenomena: the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a rubbish-covered region of ocean, several hundred miles in diameter.

The patch, north-west of Hawaii, was discovered in 1999 by researchers who found that its waters contained tens of thousands of pieces of plastic per square mile, the remains of rubbish caught in the region's circulating ocean currents. This pollution is now devastating populations of seabirds and fish that live in the region.

During his trip, which is being sponsored by the International Watch Company and Hewlett-Packard, de Rothschild will collect water samples and post blogs, photographs and video clips of the area, in an attempt to publicise the perils posed by plastic pollution.