The Great Pacific Garbage Patch: what YOU can do to help
What is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is located in the Pacific ocean. Here, currents have pulled together the plastics and wastes that are sitting in the ocean into two distinct patches. The majority of the patches is made up of plastics. You may be thinking, why don't we just use big nets and scoop all of this trash up and dispose of it properly? Like many of the environmental, political and humanitarian problems we face, it is much more complicated than that. Plastic is a material that never decomposes, meaning it will never be absorbed into the materials around it, it just breaks into smaller and smaller pieces of plastic until it is hard to distinguish the particles. These particles and pieces are called Micro-plastics. The plastic will sit along the surface or a few inches below giving the water a murky look, this in turn makes it almost imposible to determine the total area of these garbage patches. In addition to the micro-plastics there
