Earth Day's Enemy: Plastic

I used to teach environmental education at the Headlands Institute.  I had a different group of students each week and no matter what I was teaching them I would work in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a stew of our plastic and other debris that is now at least the size of the continental United States.  I watched the Algita Research Foundation's movie over and over again about the amounts of trash they were finding in the patch but I didn't know until I read this article that the lead Researcher's family made a large amount of wealth in the oil industry. 

Some interesting plastic facts from the article:

1) 90% of the trash in the ocean is made up of plastic

2) Over a million seabirds every year die from ingesting plastic and 100,000 marine mammals. 

3) The UN estimated that every square mile of ocean has 46,000 lbs of floating plastic in it. 

This is a challenging problem and I have been trying to think of a way to monotize the cleaning up of this patch, which will likely be very difficult and expensive.  Perhaps as Obama expands the drill baby drill mentality we can recover some of those revenues to cover this expense.  But what if their were a way to profit from cleaning this up?  Any ideas?

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/green-living/the-worlds-rubbish-dump-a-tip-that-stretches-from-hawaii-to-japan-778016.html