“It seemed unbelievable, but I never found a clear spot. 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… ‘patch’ doesn’t begin to convey the reality,” Capt. Charles Moore, wrote in the Natural History magazine, about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in 2003.

Estimated at three times the size of France with 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is known as a “cloudy soup” for its mixture of microplastics combined with fishing gear, baby bottles, plastic lighters, everyday objects floating in the North Pacific Ocean.

It’s expanding weight of 87,000 tons is blocking sunlight needed for the food web survival, polluting oceans and crushing marine life, who get entangled in discarded fishing nets, or mistake plastic for their favorite food -- “some sea turtles caught near the patch were eating so much plastic that it made up around three-quarters of their diet,” New York Times reported in 2018.

The water pollution and toxins ingested by marine life circles back to humans, entering and contaminating the food chain.

The ecological damage caused by plastic pollution is interconnected with climate -- plastics originate from fossil fuels, and their degradation under sunlight leads to the release of greenhouse gases like ethylene and methane, which traps heat 30 times the amount of carbon dioxide.

The Ocean Clean Up has been working on research and cleanup systems to reduce plastic pollution: ​​https://theoceancleanup.com