The Great Pacific Garbage Patch

 When I try to imagine where all my garbage goes after the trash truck takes it away, I usually picture it sitting in the the dump in large, neat piles. But the truth is, our disposable plastic water bottles, shampoo bottles, and plastic wrappers don't all end up in a land fill. A lot of our waste ends up in the ocean, forming what is known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Doesn't that sound like a great future vacation destination? It is also called the Trash Islands, which can often form the misconception that the waste is compiled in compact clumps that can be easily picked up.

In reality, the waste is floating freely over an area that is said to be twice the size of Texas, although no one has been able to secure an exact size of the Trash Islands due to the fact that they are consistently growing and not all packed together. So how exactly did this horrifying creation come to be? All of the waste that ends up in the ocean either directly or by rivers is carried by currents, and many currents meet in an area of the Pacific Ocean between California and Hawaii known as the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre. A gyre that has  formed a similar creation has also been found in the Atlantic.

Research has shown that 90% of the waste on Trash Island is plastic, and that 80% of the plastic comes from land. And the plastic isn't going anywhere; most of the waste is covered in algae, protecting it so that even the sun can't take a whack at anything slightly compostable.

As a population, we have consumed to the point of no return. Even if a sound way to clean up what we have done to our oceans was possible, what would we do with the waste? Burn it, bury it? Anyway would just hurt the environment as much as letting it float around in the ocean. Even if not one more ounce of waste was created starting this second, we've still damaged the Earth beyond repair. It's not like we can just push our waste off the edge of the Earth and watch it disappear into the galaxy. I don't think anyone has a sound solution to this problem, but if our population continues down this road of endless consumption, we aren't making a solution anymore plausible.