Plying through the infamous “Garbage Patch” in the North Pacific, a solar-powered catamaran gobbles up fishing nets, plastic bags and Styrofoam blocks, and then shoves them into a high-temperature cooker to convert the litter to fuel. This fuel propels the boat farther to devour more plastic — until every large piece has been scooped up.

It sounds like an environmentalist’s dream. But it’s the ambitious mission of the Santa Cruz nonprofit Clean Oceans Project, which six months ago teamed up with a Japanese manufacturer and a San Jose distributor, E-N-ergy, to bring plastic-to-fuel technology to the Monterey Bay.

The project was founded three years ago by ocean conservationists Nick Drobac and Jim “Homer” Holm, who hope to convince investors and donors of the feasibility of cleaning up plastic pollution and creating fuel at the same time. The proposed solution addresses one of the world’s biggest environmental problems: A non-biodegradable material that clogs landfills and waterways, strangles wildlife and contaminates food sources.

“This problem is enormous,” Drobac said, “and it grows every single day.”

Drobac and Holm say they are sold on technology from Blest Co. Ltd. that uses a process called pyrolysis. Using a 110-pound Blest demonstration model, the oceans project recently illustrated how a few pounds of roadside plastic litter can be fed into the pressurized oxygen-free oven and heated to 800 degrees Fahrenheit. This liquefies the plastic, converts it to a gas, which then condenses to form a mixture of gasoline, diesel, kerosene and heavy oil.

The components can be further refined to road fuels or used directly in boilers as heating oil, in generators, or some diesel vehicles that already use biodiesel, said E-N-ergy’s Jackie Ayzenberg. The end products consist of water vapor, inert char — which can be reused as fuel — and negligible amounts of carbon dioxide. On the smaller models, “the amount of carbon dioxide is less than one adult breathing,” said Kiyoshi Nakajima, creator of the Blest machine.

Various plastic resin types produce differing amounts of fuel. For instance, a plastic water bottle is not a good fuel source, but Styrofoam packaging is. Plastic weighing as much as a gallon of milk — roughly seven to 10 pounds — generates a gallon of fuel.

Creating fuel from plastic is not a new concept. In fact, nearly a dozen companies outside the U.S. have been converting plastic to crude oil on a commercial scale in the last decade. Klean Industries, which has facilities in Europe and Asia, has been operating for 12 years. The last two years, Illinois-based Plastic Recycling Corp. has produced heating oil for homes from two plants in China.

According to a report funded by the American Chemistry Council, the technology is gaining momentum in the U.S. The hurdles include rewriting state pollution laws such as California’s to allow the technology, and creating financial credits and incentives for plastic fuel technology.

Blest’s first commercial U.S. installation will be in New York state early next year to convert oil made from Styrofoam back into plastic. Outside the U.S., 60 large-scale operations exist in Japan alone, and Tanzanian villagers use Blest’s smaller machine to convert old mosquito netting to heating oil. In Nepal, a truck-mounted system converts plastics to fuel, traveling from village to village to promote waste recycling.

The plastics that Drobac and Homer want to repurpose are in nearly every ocean, an ever-changing patch that contains an unknown volume of soupy plastic litter.

With limited recycling options, plastics from oceangoing vessels or from land migrate to these ocean swirls. Errant fishing gear entangles animals, fish ingest plastic particles that accumulate up the food web and toxic chemicals such as PCBs and DDEs are attracted to these plastics.

The challenge of the Clean Oceans Project: Convince investors their cleanup method is the solution.

“The technology is so new, it’s hard to get people on board with it,” Drobac said.

Drobac and Homer says they are confident their approach will work.

The funding for the project now comes mostly out of the pockets of Drobac and Homer. They also have a staff of up to 12 volunteers who work out of a small office near the Santa Cruz harbor. Assembling a seagoing expedition, however, will far exceed their current funding.

They would like to integrate into a catamaran a commercial Blest system that processes about 500 pounds of plastic daily. The price tag: $189,000.

Currently, the group is investigating what collection strategies minimize injury to marine life and where larger plastics might clump by capitalizing on technologies like satellite-based imagery.

A few environmental groups have proposed bringing ocean plastics back to shore to recycle. But many, including the Clean Oceans Project, dismiss the idea.

“Bringing it back to land is absurd,” said Mark Murray, executive director of Californians Against Waste. “That’s not a sustainable collection strategy.”

But environmentalists say that a lot needs to change to create a land-based plastic-to-fuel industry, which encourages recycling and prevents plastic trash from despoiling the landscape.

“It’s completely meaningless if we can’t eliminate the amount of plastics going into the environment,” Drobac said. “Our goal is to clean up plastic in the ocean, but it starts on land first.”

Even with California’s recycling incentives, 3.8 million tons of plastic still go to California landfills each year, said Mark Oldfield, a spokesman for the state agency CalRecycle.

Plastic beverage containers make up most of the recycling market for plastics. That market exists largely because California and nine other “bottle bill” states require deposits of five or 10 cents on them. In the Golden State, nearly 80 percent of plastic water and soda bottles are recycled, compared with the national rate of 28 percent, Murray said.

But most of the plastic recovered through curbside recycling program gets baled and shipped overseas. Their fate is unknown since “an end use hasn’t been provided for those plastics,” Murray said.

Jeffrey Smedburg, the recycling coordinator for Santa Cruz County, agreed. “Some of it probably gets burned or thrown away,” he said. “We don’t have any control.”

Establishing an inexpensive method of separating and collecting unrecyclable plastics would allow plastic-to-fuel technology to flourish in the U.S., and keep the source for potential fuel from going overseas.

And if the industry takes off, Homer said, collecting scrap plastic would suddenly become worthwhile. “If we make this trash worth money, someone will pick it up,” he said. “It would be much like recycling aluminum did for cans.”

To illustrate his point, Murray noted that recycling rates of plastic beverage containers soared from 2 percent to nearly 80 percent as their cash-in value rose from a penny to a nickel or a dime apiece.

By fostering relationships with businesses like farms, which generate large amounts of plastic waste, the oceans group hopes to show that the plastic conversion technology will work on land. And that should help fuel their cause at sea.

“There is no one solution to this problem, and it’s probably not going to happen in our lifetime,” Drobac said. “But the idea of not doing anything and letting it sit there is unacceptable.”