The GPGP is roughly three times the size of France!

• That’s about 750,000 mi² of trash in just this one part of the ocean!

Fishing nets account for about 45% of the entire Garbage Patch

It is one of 5 very similar patches

• The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is located within the North Pacific Gyre

• There are garbage patches also located in the Indian Ocean Gyre, North Atlantic Gyre, South Atlantic Gyre, and the South Pacific Gyre

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is the largest and most densely polluted ocean patch in the world!

• It contains between 1.1-3.6 trillion pieces of plastic - about 200 pieces of plastic for every person on earth

• This also means that if a piece of plastic enters the patch, it is extremely unlikely for it to go away

• The GPGP is like a huge, circular conveyor belt, therefore the circular nature of the currents makes it difficult for anything to move away

It is predicted that 70% of the plastic debris in the GPGP will sink to the bottom of the ocean over time

• Bottles tend to sink the quickest, while plastic bags hang around the top of the surface most of the time

Plastic has been accumulating here since the 1950s

• That means there’s stuff in there that is decades old, including several toys and plastic glasses

• It isn’t certain that the plastic here will ever disappear - there is a lot of microplastic located in every layer of the ocean till the floor itself

A nonprofit organization called ‘The Ocean Cleanup’ raised over $31.5 million to launch the biggest ocean cleanup in history

• It consists of a 600-meter-long floating boom that collects plastic debris inside a containment area

• It is then picked up by a ship which acts as the ‘garbage truck of the ocean’

• Their goal is to remove 50% of the plastic in this area in the next 5 years, so they can move on to collect debris from other gyres as well.