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It took all nations to create this mess.  It should be a United Nations agenda item to clean it up.  Skimmers can clean up the large items.  The problem is the micro particles that come from the breakdown of the garbage.  This is going to be a hugely expensive project. Education is a good way to stop the dumping.  But, the plastic that's there will remain for many lifetimes to come.

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Recycling is incredibly important. We should probably fund more research and models of plastic recovery.

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Need to be able to think outside the box to find solutions.

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Need to be able to think outside the box to find solutions.

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We need to find an alternative to plastic.  (Do not throw away any plastic!)

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-Net everything? This also nets wildlife :(
-Cost prohibitive to clean it up
-If we could get the plastic, we could turn it into a fuel source! But, how do we get it without further damaging the ecosystem?

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Incorporate recycling into as much of your life as you can! use recyclable materials and substances, support companies and businesses that use sustainable products, reduce plastic use, support pro environmental legislation

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Use statistics from Infographic to persuade students and community members of the importance of recycling.

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Be innovative in thinking, like Boyan. He created a way to clean up the patch when others told him it was impossible!

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Do you have a green thumb? If someone asks you that, they're not wondering if your thumb is actually the color green. They're wondering if you're good with plants. Can you make "green" things like plants ?

In today's world, the color green is often associated with the Earth and its environment. So many of Earth's living things - from plants to trees to the grass in your front lawn - are green. That's why the movement to protect our environment - called environmentalism - is often referred to as the "green" movement or "going green."

The overall goal of environmentalism is to protect and conserve the Earth's environment. Everything we do has an impact on the environment - either good or bad. The environmentalists encourage us to pursue actions that will help rather than harm the environment.

Environmentalism can take many forms and concentrate on numerous issues. For example, attempts to reduce and strategies to increase of materials are just two common forms of environmentalism in action.

As more and more people are made aware of the effects of their actions on the environment, they seek ways to reduce the negative effects of these actions. "Going green" has become a popular saying as people take steps to help preserve the Earth for future generations.

These actions may be as simple as using a grocery bag instead of paper or plastic bags. Or they may be more complex, such as purchasing a car to reduce the burning of fuels.

"Going green" takes on new importance each year on Earth Day. As we celebrate the Earth and its natural resources, it's appropriate to think about what choices we can make to have a positive impact on the environment and reduce the negative impacts.

If you need some encouragement to "go green," consider some of these interesting facts:

The size of the world's tropical rainforests decline by 1.5 acres every second because of land development.

This reduction in the size of rainforests leads to the destruction of over 130 plant, animal and insect species every day - that's about 50,000 species per year that become extinct!

Approximately 36 of the 50 United States expect some type of water shortage by 2013.

saves energy: experts say 20 cans can be made out of recycled material with the same amount of energy it takes to make one can from new material.

A television set can run for about 3 hours on the energy saved by just one aluminum can.

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Do you have a green thumb? If someone asks you that, they're not wondering if your thumb is actually the color green. They're wondering if you're good with plants. Can you make "green" things like plants ? In today's world, the color green is often associated with the Earth and its environment.

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Do you ? Each day, you probably have many opportunities to . For example, your school might have recycling bins set up, so that you all sorts of products, from to . You might also have recycling bins set up at home for cans or newspapers.

Your parents might also have recycling bins where they work. Have you learned about the importance of recycling? The resources available on Earth are being used up by the billions of people who live here.

We all need to learn to the amount of resources we use. We also need to try to items as often as possible. If we 't items, we must strive to items, so that they be used over and over again.

But everything be recycled? No, not all things be recycled. But you might be surprised to learn how many things be recycled. In addition to cans, bottles and all sorts of , you also !

You probably use all sorts of items. Just check your refrigerator at home. How many jars and bottles do you see? If you're like most people, you probably use over 80 pounds of items every year.

Although is fragile and break easily, it be recycled and used again to make all sorts of things. Unfortunately, most people only a small portion of the they use. Recycling help the environment , though, because recycling causes less air and water pollution and uses less energy than producing new .

When arrives at a recycling plant, people and machines sort it by color. Similar colors of must be recycled together, so that recycled products are as pure as possible to maximize their strength and prevent breakage.

Once is sorted by color, it's washed thoroughly to remove any dirt or other impurities. Once the has been sorted and clean, the breaking begins. That's right! The recycling process begins with the crushing of the into a raw material called .

manufacturers love , because it's cheaper than the raw materials they'd otherwise need to produce new . It also melts at a lower temperature, so they save energy during the production process.

manufacturers mix with other materials like limestone, sand, and soda ash, and heat it to over 2600º F to make liquid , which then be poured into a mold to cool and form a finished product.

Most recycled is used to make new containers, such as jars and bottles. However, recycled also find its way into all sorts of other products, including fiberglass insulation , tiles and a variety of construction products.

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Do you ? Each day, you probably have many opportunities to . For example, your school might have recycling bins set up, so that you all sorts of products, from to . You might also have recycling bins set up at home for cans or newspapers.

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Infographic

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Like diamonds, plastics are forever. The tons dumped into the ocean float around, swirling on currents, breaking into smaller bits, never going away. Scientists have identified huge gyres of plastic in the Pacific. There is an Eastern Garbage Patch, between Hawaii and California; a Western Garbage Patch, off Japan, and a patch between them called the Subtropical Convergence Zone, north of Hawaii.

The patches are misunderstood to be visible islands of debris; you can't actually see them from a boat or plane. They are more like vast, soupy concentrations of flotsam, some of it large, some tiny, all indigestible, sickening and killing fish, birds, whales and turtles.

What you can see is what washes ashore, as countless tons of plastic do on the Hawaiian Islands, which stick up like the teeth of a comb in the middle of the northern Pacific, snagging what drifts by.

On the southern tip of the Big Island of Hawaii, deep ocean currents rub against the remote and rocky shoreline. Volunteers regularly make a long, hot trip to clean the beaches, hauling away fishing nets, lines and traps, toys, shoes, buckets and bottles. Some of the fishing debris is shipped to a Honolulu power plant and incinerated. Some is left on the beach, and more always appears.

The Hawaii Wildlife Fund, which organizes the cleanups, estimates that they have removed about 169 tons of garbage in the last 11 years from a 10-mile stretch of Hawaii Island alone, and that about 15 tons to 20 tons of new trash comes ashore each year. On May 24, two dozen people went out again.

They collected 1,312 pounds of trash, including:

191,739 plastic fragments

562 bottle or container caps

93 toothbrushes

64 beverage bottles

48 hagfish traps

35 buoys and floats

3 refrigerator doors

3 G.I. Joe Real American Hero toys

On a nearby beach at Kamilo Point, geologists have identified a new kind of plastic-infused rock, in areas where the plastic is so abundant in the sand and soil you can't avoid burning it in campfires. A paper published this month by the Geological Society of America suggests that "plastiglomerate" will someday be part of the fossil record, marking the geological era that some call the Anthropocene, for the human influence.

On Monday in Washington, the State Department will be holding an ocean conference. The topics are ocean acidification, sustainable fishing and marine pollution. The nations represented include the Seychelles, St. Lucia, Kiribati, Palau, Chile, Togo, Norway and New Zealand. Significant progress on healing the oceans is not expected.

The next cleanup is July 13 at Kamilo Point. The effort may seem futile, but at least people are doing something, like the volunteers working along shorelines in the Northeast, Texas, the Pacific Northwest and the Great Lakes.

World leaders, meanwhile? The nations of an increasingly plasticized planet? They are drifting in circles.

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Opinion | Notes From the Plasticene Epoch (Published 2014)

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Like diamonds, plastics are forever. The tons dumped into the ocean float around, swirling on currents, breaking into smaller bits, never going away. Scientists have identified huge gyres of plastic in the Pacific. There is an Eastern Garbage Patch, between Hawaii and California; a Western Garbage Patch, off Japan, and a patch between them called the Subtropical Convergence Zone, north of Hawaii.

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About a thousand miles off the coast of California floats one of mankind's dirtiest little secrets. Or at least it was a secret before the late '90s, when a seafaring scientist stumbled upon it in horror. It's a floating dump in the ocean, big enough to hold one or two Texases or maybe all of North America, depending on who you ask [sources: Stone, Silverman, SSF].

The discrepancy in size estimates may be due to the fact that since most of the trash is below the surface, the borders are almost impossible to see from above the water. Plus, the trash moves around with the currents, and there's more than one of these patches. At least one more lies in the Pacific, and they dot the entire globe. Most often, "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" refers to the one extending from Hawaii to San Francisco. That patch of trash is supposed to be the biggest, sporting an impressive 3.5 million tons (3.1 million metric tons) of watery garbage [source: SSF]. And at least 80 percent of it is plastic [source: Berton].

For decades, we've been told plastic doesn't degrade -- that it sits in landfills forever and ever and therefore it is very, very bad. (Unless you're going to Mexico and need to provide your own water so you don't get the runs -- then, it's also pretty handy. But still, very, very bad.) The truth is, plastic does degrade. It just doesn't biodegrade.

Plastic will photodegrade, a process by which it ultimately ends up breaking into countless tiny bits of the same substance. In a landfill, this may not make a huge difference. But when that plastic is seaborne, it makes all the difference in the world. And there's the rub: An ever-increasing amount of the world's ever-increasing amount of plastic refuse is ending up in the ocean.

In fact, the Pacific Ocean now hosts the largest trash dump on Earth. It's called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and it's not a pretty picture. Waste dumped both on land and at sea has made its way into a swirling vortex of oceanic trash that threatens sea life, aquatic ecosystems, fishing industries and the safety of the human seafood supply. In some coastal areas, a day at the beach is becoming a day at the sandy trash heap.

In this article, we'll see what's being done about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. We'll find out who wants to clean it up and what methods they propose to get the Herculean task done. We'll also see why that cleanup effort might be doomed from the start.

But then, there's certainly nothing wrong with a little optimism.

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Could we clean up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch?

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About a thousand miles off the coast of California floats one of mankind's dirtiest little secrets. Or at least it was a secret before the late '90s, when a seafaring scientist stumbled upon it in horror.

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Duke's Nicholas School of the Environment

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6 Tips to Stop Plastic Pollution from Biologist and Duke Alum Nick Mallos

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How The Ocean Cleanup is solving one of the biggest eco disasters of our time

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Plastics, litter and all sorts of debris have polluted our waters for years. While prevention is key, ocean cleanup also presents a daunting task.

One young ocean lover is confronting this challenge head on.

At just 22, Boyan Slat has created a barrier system that's designed to collect and remove trash from the Pacific Ocean without disrupting marine life. A Dutch inventor and entrepreneur, Slat is the founder and CEO of The Ocean Cleanup, a foundation dedicated to developing advanced technologies to rid the oceans of pollution.

When he was 16, Slat came up with the ambitious idea to clean up the oceans while he was diving in Greece and came across more plastic bags than fish. In the years since that dive he's dedicated countless hours to the project.

If all goes as planned, Slat and his team hope to collect almost half of the remnants in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which stretches across waters from the US West Coast to Japan. That's more than 150 million pounds of trash in just 10 years. Slat is currently testing his prototype the North Sea, and plans to roll out the final system within the next few years.

"It's sort of like a long floating curtain, which is about five feet above the water and five feet below the water," he says. "It acts like an artificial coastline where there is no coastline. Ocean currents in the area, they rotate, so it doesn't stay in one spot," he says. "We are basically making use of that movement to let the plastic hit the barrier, and because the barrier is in a 'V' shape, the plastic gets pushed towards the center."

From that middle of the barrier, the plastic is collected and hauled to shore for recycling.

The Ocean Cleanup prototype doesn't use any nets. Instead, the organization employs non-permeable screens to collect trash and plastics, something that helps protect marine life.

"We actually have a prototype of our system here off the coast of the Netherlands right now, and there we didn't observe any negative interaction between sea life and the structure," he says. "So we expect that won't be a problem, though we will certainly continue to monitor it - the whole reason why we're doing this is because we want to solve a problem."

While some pieces of trash and plastic are too small to be extracted from the oceans, Slat says Ocean Cleanup models show that 98 percent of materials can be collected by the group's system. He hopes the materials that are collected can be recycled and transformed into car bumpers or chairs - plastic items that have a low likelihood of winding up in the oceans once again.

"In the early days, a lot of the [ocean] impact we had as humans was sort of temporal and stuff would disappear by itself," he says. "Plastic is unique in the sense that it doesn't go away by itself, and as we now see, it becomes more harmful over time. And this is something we only started using on the large scale in the 1950s. The consumption grew exponentially, and it has this side effect, which is that millions of tons of plastic enter the oceans each year."

Though some are skeptical of Slat's plan, he's hopeful he can make a difference.

"I really think the only way to show that it can be done is to go out there and try it," he says.
This story was first published as an interview on PRI's The Takeaway, a public radio program that invites you to be part of the American conversation.

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Meet the 22-year-old with a big idea for cleaning up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch

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Plastics, litter and all sorts of debris have polluted our waters for years. While prevention is key, ocean cleanup also presents a daunting task. One young ocean lover is confronting this challenge head on. At just 22, Boyan Slat has created a barrier system that's designed to collect and remove trash from the Pacific Ocean without disrupting marine life.