Great Pacific Garbage Patch 09/04/23/oprah-shines-light-on- gre_n_ html

Light bulbs, bottle caps, toothbrushes, Popsicle sticks and tiny pieces of plastic, each the size of a grain of rice, inhabit the Pacific garbage patch, an area of widely dispersed trash that doubles in size every decade and is now believed to be roughly twice the size of Texas.

Several major sea currents converge in the gyre and bring with them most of the flotsam from the Pacific coasts of Southeast Asia, North America, Canada and Mexico.

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A shark carcass on Kamilo Beach, Hawaii, where plastic particles outnumber sand grains until you dig down about a foot

Environmental impacts Bottle caps and other plastic objects are visible inside the decomposed carcasses of these albatrosses

World biggest garbage dump - plastic in the Ocean HGXvs&feature=relatedhttp:// HGXvs&feature=related

Sources of rubbish There is no strong scientific data concerning the origins of pelagic plastics. The figure that an estimated 80% of the garbage comes from land-based sources and 20% from ships, is derived from an unsubstantiated estimate

Research and cleanup In April 2008, Environmental Cleanup Coalition formed to address the issue of North Pacific pollution. ECC collaborates with other groups to identify methods to safely remove plastic and persistent organic pollutants from the oceans.

Project Kaisei is a project to study and clean up the garbage patch launched in March In August 2009 two project vessels, the New Horizon and the Kaisei, embarked on a voyage to research the patch and determine the feasibility of commercial scale collection and recycling.

Plastics-harvesting nets mounted on a vessel