The Great Pacific Garbage Patch Is Three Times The Size Of France

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is much larger than initially thought. The garbage patch is spread over 617,000 square miles and is comprised of at least 79,000 tons of plastic and other debris floating in the Pacific Ocean between California and Hawaii.

The results of the most comprehensive study on the patch, which was first discovered in 1997, found that most of the garbage is discarded fishing gear. 46 percent of the trash is discarded fishing nets. The study found that around 20 percent of the collected garbage came from the 2011 tsunami that struck Fukushima, Japan.

The findings shocked the study's lead author Laurent Lebreton. He expected that fishing gear would make up around 20 percent of the trash.

“I knew there would be a lot of fishing gear, but 46 percent was unexpectedly high,. Initially, we thought fishing gear would be more in the 20 percent range. That is the accepted number globally—20 percent from fishing sources and 80 percent from land."

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