Great Pacific Garbage Patch - Where does all the plastic go?
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch will soon include debris from the Japanese tsunami, while one million to 2 million tons of lumber, construction material, refrigerators, TVs, fishing boats and other fragments from Japanese coastal towns make their way across the Pacific.
- Discovered in 1997 by Captain Charles Moore
- 2008: 45 kilos of trash per kilo of plankton
- The floating dump covers an area one and a half time the size of the USA
- Plastic constitutes 90 percent of all trash floating in the world's oceans
- Every square kilometre of ocean hosts roughly 120,000 pieces of floating plastic
- The world produced 300 billion pounds of plastic each year, about 10% ends up in the ocean, 70% of which eventually sinks
- It has been estimated that over a million sea-birds and one hundred thousand marine mammals and sea turtles are killed each year by ingestion of plastics or entanglement
- 80 percent of ocean trash originates on land
- The Eastern Garbage Patch floats between Hawaii and California (two times bigger than Texas)
- The Western Garbage Patch forms east of Japan and west of Hawaii
- Plastic does not biodegrade, no natural process can break it down
