Enormous ocean dump poses huge cleanup challenge

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch

Japan, along with many Pacific Rim countries has been discharging plastic waste for sixty years. For the past six decades or so, this waste has made its way into the Pacific Ocean, large and small, fragmenting and accumulating as a kind of swirling sewer in the North Pacific subtropical gyre, an area known as the Eastern Pacific Garbage Patch.

Bottle caps and other plastic objects are visible inside the decomposed carcass of this Laysan albatoss on Kure Atoll, which lies in a remote and virtually uninhabited region of the North Pacific. The bird probably mistook the plastics for food and ingested them while foraging.