plastic islands in the pacific

The very thing that makes plastic items useful to consumers, their durability and stability, also makes them a problem in marine environments. Around 100 million tons of plastic are produced each year of which about 10 percent ends up in the sea. About 20 percent of this is from ships and platforms, the rest from land.

The Plastic Islands in the Pacific are stated as being twice the size of Texas and weighing 7 billions pounds. Some reports call it an enormous soup of plastic debris that has grown rapidly to twice the size of the U.S. This drifting "soup" stretches from about 500 nautical miles off the Californian coast, across the northern Pacific, past Hawaii and almost as far as Japan. An ongoing voyage into the foul soup of garbage has revealed it is composed of two huge vortices one in the eastern Pacific and one in the western Pacific. The vortices are maintained by a confluence of subsurface currents and by regions of high atmospheric pressure above the subtropical Pacific Ocean.

There’s six times as much plastic as biomass, including plankton and jellyfish, in the gyre.
These plastic patches have profound implications for wildlife because birds tend to eat bits of plastic and marine mammals can be strangled by them. Moreover, the plastic can accumulate in areas where currents are forcing nutrients upward - zones of high biological activity. The consequences are deadly to a wide range of species.

50-60 years ago there was no plastic in the sea.