Project Kaisei - Co-Founder and Director
http://www.projectkaisei.org

People's Republic of China (Hong Kong)

Doug has worked in Asia for the past 18 years in a number of industries which have been at the forefront of technology within their sectors. Doug is the Co-Founder and Director of Project Kaisei, a recently established (2008) non-profit organization based in San Francisco and Hong Kong. The goal is to increase the understanding of the scale of marine debris, its impact on our ocean environment, how best to prevent future waste, and how to accelerate efforts to clean-up this vast and growing challenge. To accomplish these objectives, Project Kaisei is serving as a catalyst bringing together public and private collaborators, sponsors and research institutions to design, test and implement break-throughs in science, prevention and remediation.

In August, Project Kaisei initiated a new collaboration with Scripps Institution and sponsored two research vessels to the North Pacific Gyre (the "Plastic Vortex") - one of which was Scripps' New Horizon, and the other was the Kaisei. Project Kaisei has been selected as a Climate Hero by the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) in the lead up to the Copenhagen talks this December. Doug is an advisor to the XPrize in the United States for two new ocean prizes they plan to launch for exploration and ocean debris solutions in the coming year.

Doug is also consultant for a number of environmental technologies, including Verte Asia, which specializes in living vertical green walls which can have significant energy efficiency improvements with urban design. He is active in the environmental community as well, and is currently the Chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce’s Environmental Committee in Hong Kong. He has written articles and spoken at numerous regional events on renewable energy, marine and pollution related issues.

Born in California, Mr. Woodring has a dual masters degree from The Wharton School (MBA) and Johns Hopkins University, School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) where he studied Environmental Economics. He has an undergraduate degree in Economics and Political Science from the University of California at Berkeley.

Project Kaisei ("Ocean Planet" in Japanese), is based in Hong Kong and San Francisco, and was set up in 2009 to address the issue of plastic waste in our ocean, mainly in the North Pacific Gyre, an area some say is twice the size of Texas. Our August 2009 expedition, in collaboration with Scripps Oceanography, sent two research teams to study the impact and scale of the plastic in the ocean, how it affects the ecosystem and potentially the food chain, and how it can be cleaned up.

Project Kaisei is a collaboration of science, innovation, technology, industry, policy and education, all coming together to solve both the issue in the ocean, but also to address how we can change the way we consume and use plastic on land. Donors in the project have come from the US, Europe and Asia, and see value in being part of a global cause that is using new types of technology to both spread the word, and seek innovative solutions. By bringing new media platforms together with sponsors and a cause, both are likely to achieve more exposure, and thus, more impact in achieving the goal of motivating change and improvement.