The Pacific Garbage Patch is a large patch of trash in the pacific ocean that is in between Hawaii and California. Although “large” might be an understatement to the size of the garbage patch. It weighs more than 43,000 cars. It weighs about 83,000 tons and it has 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic in it. Micro plastic accounts for 94% percent of the plastics there, but only account for 8% of the overall mass of the patch. The Pacific Garbage Patch takes up 600,000 square miles. Around 99.9% of the patch is plastic trash. This really puts into perspective how much of a problem plastic is considering how much of it makes up an enormous chunk of garbage.
Scientists even have trouble estimating the size of the Pacific Garbage Patch. They failed to capture things like bottles. It was hard to count by eye for smaller portions of it. They had to extrapolate to get their final estimate that still varied greatly to the actual amount. Photographers used plastic currents and math models to scale the Pacific Garbage Patch.
With scientists and photographers scaling the size of the patch, conservationists can use these measurements to come up with solutions to the large concentration of mostly plastic based trash floating in the Pacific.
Plastic Hurts The Ocean 