The two small communities on the isolated Australian islands of Cocos Keeling are long-time winners of the country's "Tidy Towns" competition but, just steps away, three Vancouver sailors found a different story.

On the eastern side of the atoll, strong trade winds bring waves crashing onto the shores, and with the waves come piles of plastic stretching out to the horizon.

That's all Ryan Robertson saw when he landed on the beach two years ago as part of a Vancouver-based exhibition to document plastic found in the oceans and beaches around the world.

"We usually pick up (clean) 100 metres of beach -- this time we could get nowhere close to it. We ended up just selecting a random 10-metre section and then decided we're only going to collect sandals and only going to collect pop bottles," he said by phone in Vancouver, where he returned to take care of his now three-month-old son, Dorian.

In that 10-metre section of beach, he and his crewmates, younger brother Bryson Robertson and friend Hugh Patterson, found 350 sandals and 240 pop bottles.

After an hour or two of cataloguing the jetsam, the waves had washed ashore enough trash to obscure their effort.

That garbage came from Indonesia, just 2,000 kilometres to the east of Cocos Keeling, however plastic from all around the world, including North Vancouver, ends up in the world's oceans.

Three years ago the group set off from Mexico to sail the world and collect samples of the garbage they find on beaches along the way.

Within a week, they will be home in Vancouver after a successful expedition -- sort of. Ryan said their journey has shown them the problem was far worse than they expected.

For him, the full extent came crashing down in the waves at Cocos Keeling.

"Where there's so much plastic and the oceans are so full of garbage there, you just want to give up -- that your whole mission is futile. You feel like the change you're making in a few people is just a drop in the ocean compared to how large the problem is."

On each beach they documented what they found and tried to determine where it was from -- sometimes nearby islands and sometimes cruise ships.

But the last leg of the journey has taken the group into the largest ocean garbage dump in the world, where much of the plastic from North America winds up.

The swirling ocean and wind currents push all the garbage in the North Pacific into one spot, called the North Pacific Gyre, where a high pressure zone causes it to get stuck. There, the plastic floats around in a garbage dump the size of Alberta far out of sight from most.

Because the plastic can't fully break down naturally, the sea is littered with tiny pieces of plastic the size of zooplankton, which are then ingested by the fish and birds.

Bryson described it as "like a dense plastic soup." Hundreds, if not thousands, of pieces less than two centimeters across float by every hour, he said.

The expedition dragged a small, 45-centimetre-wide net from behind their boat across several oceans, which pulled a treasure trove of plastic out of the sea for the crew to analyze. In the gyre, there was far more plastic than marine life.

But even outside the gyre in the supposedly vast, pristine ocean, the group would pick up as much plastic as marine life whenever they dropped the net.

"If this is the amount of plastic we encounter on the infinitely small path of ocean we have crossed, then to multiply it across the entire ocean becomes mind-boggling," said Patterson.

Ryan agreed.

"The reality is that plastics like that exist in every ocean in the world, they just don't have a place to collect," he said, explaining why there's nothing like the Great Pacific Gyre anywhere else in the world.

Throughout their journey they stopped at schools in each community to talk to students about plastic use, and have built links with schools from South Africa to Sutherland secondary in North Vancouver.

Back ashore, they plan to keep working on their mission, with a documentary called Our Plastic Oceans planned for release in 2011.

Other videos from their journey, as well as updates about the research and their current position, can be found on their website at www.oceangybe.com, or by searching Oceangybe on www.youtube.com.

The response has always been overwhelmingly positive, said Ryan.

"Probably the most rewarding part of the trip is speaking to kids. They're so engaged, they ask the correct questions, you can tell it's sinking in," he said, adding he's received emails from parents asking what they should do with their child's newfound interest in recycling.

Ryan, however, chooses to emphasise reducing the amount of plastic used by buying goods that aren't prepackaged rather than recycling. Simply cutting plastic out of our lives is the only way to be sure it doesn't end up in places like the North Pacific Gyre, he said.

But even if that does happen, this expedition has chronicled just how much pollution there is already floating in our oceans.

tholloway@nsnews.com