by Shelly Barclay

Created on: December 18, 2009

The amount of waste in the world’s oceans has been increasing greatly in the past century and the problem continues to get worse. It has gotten to the point where there are areas of the ocean where trash outnumbers sea life (this includes plankton!). These areas of the ocean are known as trash swills. There are a number of them on Earth and each of Earth’s oceans contains at least one. The greatest of all of these trash swills is commonly known as the ‘Great Pacific Garbage Patch.’ It is also known as the ‘Plastic Continent.’

The ‘Great Pacific Garbage Patch’ is located in the Pacific Ocean between Hawaii and California. It is roughly 1,000 miles off of the coast of California. Trash from Japan, the United States, Mexico and various other countries get caught in the ocean’s currents and eventually get caught in the North Pacific Subtropical Convergence Zone. Some of this trash breaks into pieces, eventually comes free and floats away, sinks to the ocean floor or floats on or below the surface.

It is difficult to determine the size of this mass of plastic and trash for various reasons. Firstly, the the ‘Great Pacific Garbage Patch’ does not always maintain the same exact location. The collection of plastic and trash is also amorphous, so getting a precise measurement would take some doing. There is also the fact that not all of the trash is on the surface and to get a correct measurement of its size, one would have to measure its depth as well, which is no simple task. Estimates regarding the size of the ‘Great Pacific Garbage Patch’ have ranged from the size of Texas to one and a half times the size of the United States.

Eighty percent of the ‘Great Pacific Garbage Patch’ is recyclable plastic material. It’s no wonder some people have taken to calling it the ‘Plastic Continent.’ There is also no feasible way of removing it and recycling it. At this point, the ‘Great Pacific Garbage Patch’ is getting larger with no end in sight. And this is only the tip of the iceberg of the world’s plastic problem. Just imagine how much of it is sitting around on this planet, not being recycled and endangering the wildlife. When you take into account the fact that plastic has only been mass-produced for the past sixty years or so, it is easy to imagine that our oceans may be literally clogged with plastic in the foreseeable future.

The amount of plastic

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