By Magella Moreau and Skye Hernandez
The Green Light Network - Plastikeep

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch

Imagine an island in the North Pacific Ocean, larger than the United States’ state of Texas, whose geological composition is plastic waste. The “island” is, in fact real and its existence highlights one of the major problems of the 21st century – plastic and our dependence on it, its toxicity to animals and humans and our inability to get rid of it in an environmentally sustainable way.

The “island” (not a solid mass, but a geographical location) is in the North Pacific sub-tropical gyre, which covers a huge area in the Pacific near Hawaii, where the water circulates clockwise in a slow spiral. Plastic is brought there by the currents of the world’s oceans, and it stays there, choked with dead fish, marine mammals and snared birds. Some plastics in the gyre will not break down in the lifetime of the grandchildren of the people who threw them away. As a result of this large amount of plastic, the gyre has been dubbed the Great Pacific Garbage Patch or the Pacific Trash Vortex.