In the early dawn of one summer day in 2008, Marcus Eriksen’s raft, floating in the Pacific 60 miles west of Los Angeles, was sinking.

Fifty-knot gusts churned the sea and threaded through the powerless vessel, pulling it apart. This should not have been a surprise.

After all, the raft, named Junk, was constructed of a Cessna airplane fuselage sitting atop ply board and strapped to 15,000 plastic bottles.

Eriksen had been motivated by the plastics crisis eight years earlier, when he had visited Midway Atoll, a speck of flat land at the western edge of the Hawaii archipelago.

There lay hundreds of thousands of laysan albatross nests.

Led by the biologist Heidi Auman, Eriksen’s visit was focused on the amount of plastic that the birds ingest as food.

Albatross parents feed their young the shocking range of plastics that litter the island and its waters – toothbrushes, utensils, wires, cigarette lighters – providing a false sense of satiety.

Many of the birds die, of course, and their rotting carcasses burst open to reveal stomachs overstuffed with plastics.

Eriksen is a man of action.

He dedicated his life to bringing what he witnessed at Midway Atoll to those who were unaware of how humanity’s love affair with plastic had become a horror show for our oceans.

In 2003, he paddled 2,000 miles down the Mississippi in the Bottle Rocket, a raft made of 232 two-litre plastic bottles, to bring attention to the waterway’s pollution.

Next, Eriksen wanted to see where all the plastic from North America’s rivers ends up.

He travelled to the Great Pacific garbage patch – a collection of human debris bigger than Peru trapped in a circular ocean current – guided by the man who is credited with discovering it, Capt Charlie Moore.

There, Eriksen learned that the patch is less garbage and more a thick soup of fragmented plastics, or as he would write, “a kaleidoscope of microplastics, like sprinkles on cupcakes”.

He realised it would be nearly impossible to clean up the tiny fragments infiltrating marine life.

In 2014, after 24 expeditions, Eriksen and a team of scientists would be the first to estimate the total weight of plastics in the world’s oceans: around 250,000 tonnes.

The scale of this crisis mocks attempts such as my family’s to reduce the amount of waste – especially plastic – in the world.

The US Environmental Protection Agency estimated that Americans threw out nearly 51m tonnes of plastic in 2021, or about 140kg per person.

Even if I had somehow managed not to consume and throw away a single ounce of plastic for an entire year, my actions would have reduced the country’s total plastic waste by about a vanishingly tiny amount.

When I finally did these calculations, the amount of energy and worry I’d spent on my slow-buy year seemed absurd.

This was the conundrum buzzing in my head when I sat down to interview Marcus Eriksen.

He wore dark jeans and a black fleece sweater; with glasses perched atop his salt-and-pepper hair, he had a professorial air.

Although ascetics point to the question of individual responsibility for what we consume, Eriksen emphasises that our modern debate has been shaped by narratives created by some of the corporations most responsible for the crisis we find ourselves in.