The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, also known as the Pacific Trash Vortex, is an area in the North Pacific where circulating water currents and wind movements have created an island-like area of concentrated floating plastic garbage.
Constantly growing, it is believed to increase in size 10 fold every decade.
American Oceanographer Charles Moore first encountered the garbage patch in 1997 when returning to California after finishing the Los Angeles to Hawaii Transpac Yacht Race and reported that it took him 7 full days to cross it.
20 years later and this monstrosity measures around 1.6 million square kilometers and contains approximately 80,000 tonnes of plastic, that's over twice the size of Texas and 500 times heavier than a house.

A surprising thing about this area is that, despite its size, it is virtually invisible to satellites and aircraft, this is because 94% of it is made up of minute fragments of plastic called microplastics.
This complicates any location and clean-up process because it means the plastic can only be located and retrieved by boat.
These Microplastics measure just a few millimeters in diameter which also makes it very hard to remove them from the ocean without removing a large amount of important sea life with them.
Another thing that complicates the cleanup process is that because this "plastic island" is out in the middle of the ocean, miles away from any land, no country will accept responsibility for its clean-up, and with no funding, it is just left to grow.

Perhaps the most troubling thing about this floating island of trash is that it isn't unique.
There are similar garbage patches in the North Atlantic, discovered in 2009, the Indian Ocean, discovered in 2010, the South Pacific, discovered in 2011, and the South Atlantic, discovered in 2017. There was even one discovered fairly recently in the Meditteranean sea.

There are various non-profit organizations attempting to solve this problem but they are drastically underfunded, and while projects like Mr. Beast's "Team Seas" plan to raise $30 million in 2 months to remove 30 million pounds of trash from our oceans are admirable and applaudable, they are neither practical nor economical.
Between 30 and 80 million pounds of plastic enter our oceans every single day! so in the 2 months, it took to remove 30 million pounds, approximately 3 billion pounds more entered.
And at a cost of $1 a pound, today you would need around 370 Trillion dollars to clear what is currently in the ocean, and every day that passes, you'll need 3 billion dollars more.


It seems the only way we can really tackle this problem is to adapt and make changes in our lives to reduce our own dependency on plastics and therefore the amount of plastic that ends up in the ocean.
Stop buying bottled water,
Avoid take-out food that uses single-use plastics,
Recycle all we can,
Avoid buying items with excessive packaging,
Avoid products that contain microbeads,
Understand that any plastic product that we don't recycle, sooner or later, will end up in our oceans and that if we as the consumer don't buy plastic, the manufacturers won't produce it.

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