The Pacific Garbage Vortex

It seemed unbelievable, but I never found a clear spot.

Wakuya

In the week it took to cross the subtropical high, no matter what time of day I looked, plastic debris was floating everywhere: bottles, bottle caps, wrappers, fragments. ...he began referring to the area as the “eastern garbage patch.” But “patch” doesn’t begin to convey the reality. Ebbesmeyer has estimated that the area, nearly covered with floating plastic debris, is roughly the size of Texas.

 The tales of Garbage Island are lurid.

Like all good stories, it grew over time...“We even came upon a floating island bolstered by dozens of plastic buoys used in oyster aquaculture that had solid areas you could walk on.” Again no photo of the floating island, let alone of him walking on it.

 If you've wondered where those tales come from, read here. If you want to see the garbage patch, read here.

(Feb'17) If I wanted a sensational claim supported by the facts of this article, I could say that in the middle of the garbage vortex there may be 2-4000 pieces of garbage floating in every square meter of ocean.

By "pieces of garbage" I mean 2-3 mm chunks of plastic.  By "floating in" I mean that there is, on average, one piece suspended in every cubic meter or two of ocean. Since the ocean is about 4000 m deep, 2-4000 pieces.

(Dec'18) Here is a different perspective from The Ocean Cleanup project. They claim that, while the number of tiny pieces of plastic vastly exceeds the number of large pieces, over 90% of the mass is contained in big objects. In particular, old fishing nets form clumps that collect other bits of debris over a cubic meter in size. (3 min video below; 7.5 min background here.)

Their cleanup idea, working for less than a year so far, hasn't been very successful. Other groups have suggested paying fishermen to collect plastic. Still others have proposed that our best return will be to collect the plastics in the countries and rivers it is coming from.