The "Great Pacific Garbage Patch", or sometimes known as the Eastern Garbage patch, is a patch of the Pacific Ocean between California and Hawaii. It is about twice the size of Texas and is located in part of the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre. It contains hundreds of square miles of floating garbage, 90% of which is plastics in the form of six-pack rings, balloons, drinking cups, broken pieces of toys, plastic bags, and so on.

Captain Charles Moore encountered this in 1997 when sailing between Honolulu and California. He later formed the Algalita Marin Research Foundation dedicated to preserving the marine environment through education of the public.

Even before Moore first ran into it, a paper published by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in 1988 reported high plastic density in area in the Japan Sea. From this, scientist believed that based on ocean current movements that similar concentration of plastic would occur in the North Pacific Gyre as well.

Some of these bits of plastic get eaten by birds and sea life who mistaken them for food.  Plastics have been found in the stomach of Albatross.  Birds have straved to death because their digestive tracts has been stuffed with non-digestible plastics.  You will see some distrubing pictures of dead birds caused by plastics in the below video.

Because plastics absorb pollutants like PCB and DDT, these pollutants can accumulated in animal tissues and possibly ascend the food chain into the fish that we eat.

Based on Moore calculations, for every 100 square meter, there was about half a pound of garbage.  That amounts to 3 million tons of plastic there -- about 6 times the amount of plankton by wieght in the same area. 

It is estimated that only 20% of it come from ships in the ocean.  The rest must have been bits and pieces that have blown off garbage trucks, went through storms drains, in to the rivers, and this is where it ends up.  Ocean currents are such that floatsom congrugates in that area. 

Plastic biodegrade at such slow rates that it is hardly significant.  They just disintegrate into smaller and smaller pieces.  Dr. Anthony Andrady, research scientist with North Carolina's Research Triangle says "Except for a small amount that's been incinerated, every bit of plastic manufactured in the world for the last 50 years or so still remains.  It's somewhere in the environment." [1]

What about clean up?  Trying to scoop all these tiny pieces of plastic (some too small to be seen) is expensive and Moore believes it is best to stop the plastic at its source and not let them get into the storm drains and rivers in the first place.

What does the Pacific Garbage Patch look like?

Picture of the garbage patch are not easy to come by because they can not be seen in areal or satellite photos. You have to be sailing through it to see it. Much of the plastic is just below the water surface. Some pictures can be found on the Algalita.org site as well as in the above video.

During one of Moore's regular trips to the Pacific Garbage Patch, Thomas Morton went along and wrote a good descriptive article of what he saw.

As of this writing, Moore's latest trip to the Pacific Garbage Patch started on June 10, 2009. Moore described what he found in an email published on the HuffingtonPost.

• [1] Chapter 9 of the book The World Without Us by Alan Weisman
• Great Pacific Garbage Patch on Wikipedia
• "Our Oceans Are Turning Into Plastic...Are We?" by BestLifeOnline.com