Far away from California's coast, where the Pacific Ocean currents swirl, the blue of the sea was replaced by fishing nets, buckets, buoys, laundry baskets and unidentifiable pieces of plastic. They floated past the Ocean Starr. It is a ship that was carrying a team of scientists and volunteers. They were gathering data on plastic garbage.
 
"We were surrounded by an endless layer of garbage," sad Serena Cunsolo. She is an Italian marine biologist who works for The Ocean Cleanup. "It was devastating to see."
 
Cunsolo, 28, was one of a team of 15 researchers and volunteers aboard the Ocean Starr. The ship set out this summer from San Francisco to study the plastic waste. The trip was part of the "Mega Expedition." The trip was a major step in the organization's effort to eventually clean up what's known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
 
The 171-foot mother ship carried massive white bags filled with plastic garbage. The vessel returned to San Francisco along with two sailing boats with volunteers who helped collect the garbage samples.
 
Most of the trash they found, including a 1-ton fishing net, is medium to large-sized pieces, as opposed to confetti-like plastic shards. The smaller pieces can easily enter the food chain after being eaten by small fish and birds. They are extremely difficult to clean up, said Boyan Slat. He founded The Ocean Cleanup and has developed a technology that he says can start removing the garbage by 2020.
 
"It was a good illustration of why it is such an urgent thing to clean up. Because if we don't clean it up soon, then we'll give the big plastic time to break into smaller and smaller pieces," Slat said.
 
Volunteer crews on 30 boats have been measuring the size and mapping the location of tons of plastic waste floating between the West Coast and Hawaii. According to some estimates, the area is twice the size of Texas.
 
Slat said the group will publish a report of its findings by mid-2016. After that, the group hopes to test out a 1-mile barrier. It would collect garbage near Japan. The ultimate goal is the construction of a 60-mile barrier in the middle of the Pacific.
 
The expedition was sponsored by The Ocean Cleanup. It's an organization founded by Slat. He is a 21-year-old innovator from the Netherlands. Slat has envisioned using long-distance floating barriers that will attach to the seabed with an anchoring system used by oil-drilling rigs. The devices will target ocean currents full of waste. The barriers would skim garbage from the surface. Meanwhile, aquatic life and the currents themselves pass underneath.
 
He first became passionate about cleaning the oceans of plastic while diving in the Mediterranean Sea five years ago. "I was diving in Greece and realized that there were more plastic bags than fish. And I wondered why can't we clean this up," Slat said.
 
After dropping out of university after his first six months, Slat dedicated his life to developing the technology the group will start testing next year.
 
He decided to launch a Kickstarter campaign and raised about $2.27 million that helped to launch his organization. Soon, his innovative solution got the attention of major philanthropists in Europe and Silicon Valley. One was Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff. The philanthropists are helping pay for the data-gathering efforts and the technology's development.
 
The Pacific expedition, which will end in mid-September, will gather data that will be more extensive than what has been collected in the past 40 years. It also will give a better estimate of the how much plastic waste is in the Pacific Ocean, Slat said.
 
The boaters are using GPS and a smartphone app to search for and record the plastic. They take samples and ship them to the Netherlands. There, the plastics are counted and recorded.
 
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch was discovered by Charles J. Moore in 1997 as he returned home from the Transpacific Yacht Race, which starts in Los Angeles and ends in Honolulu.