Great Pacific Garbage Patch

• You might ask whatIt looks like from up Above?

The Facts!• Founded first by a sailor named Charles Moore as he crossed the Pacific in 1997 after competing in

the Transpacific Yacht Race.• The patch, you see, isn’t well understood. People think it’s like a solid mass of trash you’d find at a

dump site. But you can’t you walk on it. You can’t land a plane on it, it’s really diffuse, like “plastic soup,” as Moore describes it. SO DON’T LET THE NAME CONFUSE YOU.

• Plastic waste is one of the most significant sources of marine pollution. It accounts for 90 percent of all debris floating in the oceans

• It is roughly the size of Texas, containing approximately 3.5 million tons of trash. Shoes, toys, bags, pacifiers, wrappers, toothbrushes, and bottles too numerous to count.

• Floats between Hawaii and San Francisco.• Every square mile of ocean hosts 46,000 pieces of floating plastic.• Of the more than 200 billion pounds of plastic the world produces each year, about 10 percent ends

up in the ocean. That’s 20 billion pounds.• Of the 20 billion pounds, 70% of that eventually sinks, damaging life on the ocean floor. That’s 14

billion pounds of plastic each year going to the bottom of our ocean. • "What people don't get is that it's not really a patch and it's not really an island, both of which you

might be able to contain and control. No, what we found is much worse. It's like a gigantic toxic stew and it's a big big problem that we need to pay attention to now.“ says VBS.TV

Effects on Animals

• There is 6 times as much plastic than there are plankton.

• If you are a bird or fish or turtle trying to determine what to eat you have a better chance of eating plastic than getting real food which they then later die of plastic poisoning or blockage of their digestive system.

• This not only effects the oceans food chain and life but ours as well. Disease, infertility etc.

• Plastic is 100% nonbiodegradable.

What to do?

• The trash is so dispersed so we can’t just take a huge boat with a huge net out there to clean it up. Also we would risk killing any animals that are in the way.

• Best the is to prevent any more garbage from getting out to the ocean.

• There is a group project already doing things to cleanup the surface and easy trash to pick up also called Project Kaisei.