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Tony Haymet, former director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, has heard hundreds of ocean cleanup plans. Late at night, over many beers, he's come up with a few dozen of his own. None of them, he says, has seemed likely to work.

That includes this spring's offerings. A Dutch engineering student, Boyan Slat, envisions a contraption with massive booms that would sweep debris into a huge funnel. Songwriter and music producer Pharrell Williams wants to fund the monumental cost of any cleanup by turning recycled ocean plastic into yarn and then clothes.

The challenge is huge. For one thing, the garbage is spread over millions of square miles. For another, it's made up mostly of degraded plastic, broken down by sunlight and waves into tiny bits the size of grains of rice.

"That's what makes it so horrifying," Haymet says. "The micro-plastic is the same size as the stuff living in the water column. How would we ever go out and collect it? So far no one's come up with a plan to separate all the micro-plastic from the living life that's the same size."

In the face of growing criticism, Slat had to back off his optimistic boast that he could clean up the oceans in five years. He posted a notice on his website asking the media and the critics to wait until he finishes his research.

Meanwhile, the garbage keeps growing.

Consider this alarming statistic from CSIRO, Australia's national science agency, which is wrapping up a three-year study of marine debris: Every decade global production of plastics doubles. Even if someone came up with a workable collecting mechanism, how much impact could it have?

"If we are doubling what we are putting into the ocean on a ten-year basis, there's no way to keep up," says Chris Wilcox, an ecologist at CSIRO. "It would be as if you were vacuuming your living room, and I'm standing at the doorway with a bag of dust and a fan. You can constantly keep vacuuming, but you could never catch up."

The Garbage Patches

Most of the garbage accumulates in five little-explored "patches" found in the doldrums of the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans.

The largest is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which starts a few hundred miles off the coast of North America and stretches to a few hundred miles off the coast of Japan; a more concentrated area lies between California and Hawaii.

One commonly accepted estimate is that the high-density area inside the Great Pacific Garbage Patch contains 480,000 pieces of plastic per square kilometer (nearly four-tenths of a square mile). But scientists say that's only a guess.

Charles Moore, who "discovered" the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in the late 1990s and plans a research trip there in July, estimates that altogether the globe's garbage patches contain 200 million tons of floating debris. He came up with the figure based on calculations that 2.5 percent of the world's plastic ends up in the sea.

Marcus Eriksen, a marine scientist and co-founder of the California-based 5 Gyres, which studies the five main garbage patches, estimates the total floating debris is just 500,000 tons.

In either case, the harm to fish and other sea creatures is increasing. A 2009 research trip to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch by Scripps found 9 percent of the fish had ingested plastic. Eriksen, with help from seven other scientists, recently analysed material in all of the garbage patches. Of 671 fish collected, 35 percent had ingested plastic particles.

"Either number scares me," Haymet says. "Those are only the sick fish-not the ones who died because they ate plastic that was too big. And they are the only two studies. There should be hundreds of studies of this stuff. Our life, our economies are totally dependent on the oceans. Fifty percent of the oxygen we breathe is made in the ocean every night."

Addressing the Problem

Haymet and like-minded ocean scientists haven't given up. They favor a low-tech, more practical approach to protecting the oceans from trash: Persuade the world's people to stop littering.

Only about 20 percent of ocean plastic comes from marine sources, such as discarded fishing equipment or cargo ship mishaps. About 80 percent of it washes out to sea from beach litter or was carried downstream in rivers, according to the CSIRO study, which is considered the most comprehensive.

About half of that litter is plastic bottles. Most of the rest is packaging.

"All of that stuff was in a human's hand at one point or another," Wilcox says. "The essence of the solution is to provide incentives for people not to throw this stuff away. It is the cheapest, simplest, and far most efficient solution to the problem."

Creating incentives to help reduce littering can be a political challenge. Only one of Australia's eight main states and territories has a beverage-container deposit law, says Britta Denise Hardesty, who conducted the CSIRO study.

In the U.S. only ten states-including California, Maine, Massachusetts, and Connecticut-have enacted container deposit laws. Opinion polls show support for such laws, but beverage manufacturers have opposed legislation. They argue that bottle deposits are more expensive than other forms of recycling and that requiring deposits constitutes a tax, which increases the cost of beverages.

"When you think about climate change, it's hard to reduce our carbon footprint, because we have to go through a fundamental shift in our economies," Wilcox says. "With plastic, when you're throwing a bottle cap on the ground, that should be an easy impact to get rid of."

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Tony Haymet, former director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, has heard hundreds of ocean cleanup plans. Late at night, over many beers, he's come up with a few dozen of his own. None of them, he says, has seemed likely to work. That includes this spring's offerings.

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Good suggestions for prevention - how individuals can help.

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Marine Oil Pollution, MARPOL Whistleblowers, Whistleblower Rewards, Marine Debris

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Marine debris is harmful to both humans and the ocean ecosystem.
Simple lifestyle changes can reduce marine debris.
Simple lifestyle changes can dramatically reduce harmful marine debris.

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What is marine debris?
Our oceans are filled with items that do not belong there. Huge amounts of consumer plastics, metals, rubber, paper, textiles, derelict fishing gear, vessels, and other lost or discarded items enter the marine environment every day, making marine debris one of the most widespread pollution problems facing the world's ocean and waterways.

Marine debris is defined as any persistent solid material that is manufactured or processed and directly or indirectly, intentionally or unintentionally, disposed of or abandoned into the marine environment or the Great Lakes. It is a global problem, and it is an everyday problem. Marine debris is a threat to our environment, navigation safety, the economy, and potentially human safety and health.

Most of all, marine debris is preventable. Learn more about marine debris and find out how.

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Discover the Issue | OR&R's Marine Debris Program

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What is marine debris? Our oceans are filled with items that do not belong there.

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What can we do?
• Get involved! Participate in local cleanups in your area.
• Remember that the land and sea, no matter where you are, are connected.
• Reduce the amount of waste you produce.
• Reuse items whenever possible. Choose reusable items over disposable ones.
• Recycle as much as possible. Bottles, cans, cell phones, ink cartridges, and many other items can be
recycled.

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The name “garbage patch” is a misnomer. There is no island of trash forming in the middle of the ocean nor a blanket of trash that can be seen with satellite or aerial photographs.
This is likely because much of thedebris found here is small bits of
floating plastic not easily seen from a boat.

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The numbers are staggering: There are 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic debris in the ocean. Of that mass, 269,000 tons float on the surface, while some four billion plastic microfibers per square kilometer litter the deep sea.

Scientists call these statistics the "wow factor" of ocean trash. The tallies, published last year in three separate scientific papers, are useful in red-flagging the scope of the problem for the public. But beyond the shock value, just how does adding up those rice-size fragments of plastic help solve the problem?

Although scientists have known for decades about the accumulating mass of ocean debris and its deadly consequences for seabirds, fish, and marine animals, the science of sea trash is young and full of as-yet unsolved mysteries. Almost nothing was known about the amount of plastic in remote regions of the Southern Hemisphere, for example, until last year because few had ever traveled there to collect samples. (Related: " With Millions of Tons of Plastic in Oceans, More Scientists Studying Impact.")

"The first piece is to understand where it is," says Kara Lavender Law, an oceanographer at the Sea Education Association in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

Indeed, until scientists learn more about where ocean trash is, how densely plastic accumulates in different ocean ecosystems, and how it degrades, they can't really calculate the damage it's causing. There are still big, basic questions: As it degrades, do plastic toxins seep into the marine environment? If so, how and in what amounts?

And though scientists know a great deal about the damage to marine life caused by large pieces of plastic, the potential harm caused by microplastics is less clear. What effect do they have on fish that consume them?

"The greater the concentration, the greater the potential risk for exposure," says Richard Thompson, a biologist at Plymouth University in England, whose study released last month identified microfibers widely disseminated throughout the deep ocean. "If we are missing a major sink where there are major concentrations of plastic, we might not be learning how harmful plastics are." (Related: " First of Its Kind Map Reveals Extent of Ocean Plastic.")

The most recent counts add significantly to the knowledge base, yet even those big numbers are a fraction of the plastic that flows into the oceans every year. Where's the rest of it? It's another mystery. (Related: " Where Has All the (Sea Trash) Plastic Gone?")

We are dealing with pieces from hundreds of meters down to microns in size," Thompson says. "It is incredibly challenging to monitor."

By the Numbers

Ocean trash is counted in three ways: through beach surveys, computer models based on samples collected at sea, and estimates of the amount of trash entering the oceans.

The most recent counts involved computer modeling based on samples taken at sea. The models may not account for all of the trash, scientists say; nonetheless, the new numbers are helping address some of the questions.

The process of collecting and counting is meticulous, time-consuming work. It took Marcus Eriksen, co-founder of the 5 Gyres Institute, a nonprofit ocean advocacy group, more than four years, using samples gathered from 24 survey trips, to come up with his estimate that 5.25 trillion pieces of debris float on the surface.

In the course of his expeditions, Eriksen collected everything from plastic candy wrappers to giant balls of fish netting. One massive ball of netting, found midway across the Pacific, contained 89 different kinds of net and line, all wrapped around a tiny, two-inch-high teddy bear wearing a sorcerer's cap at the center.

He says his research has helped fill in the outlines of the life cycle of ocean plastic. It tends to collect in the world's five large gyres, which are large systems of spiraling currents. Then, as the plastic degrades into fragments, it falls into deeper water, where currents carry it to remote parts of the globe.

"These fragments are anywhere on the planet at this point," he says. "We're finding them everywhere."

Eriksen's findings agree with those of a Spanish scientist, Andres Cozar Cabañas, a researcher at the University of Cadiz, in Spain, who published the first global map of floating ocean debris last July. Their estimates are strikingly similar.

"We now have two estimates of what is floating, and they are almost identical," says Lavender Law. "They used different data sets and different methodology and came up with the same number. That gives us confidence we're in the right ballpark."

Another way of coming up with the numbers is to make crude guesses based on manufacturing statistics. Says Jenna Jambeck, a University of Georgia environmental engineer who is completing a worldwide calculation of garbage collected in coastal countries: "If you have 200 million tons produced every year, researchers will arbitrarily estimate that 10 percent goes into the oceans."

Sort Out the Rubbish

It's not too difficult to surmise why so much plastic ends up in the ocean. The Plastic Disclosure Project, a project run by Hong Kong-based advocacy group Ocean Recovery Alliance, estimates that 33 percent of plastic manufactured worldwide is used once, then discarded. To compound matters, 85 percent of the world's plastic is not recycled.

Despite the magnitude of the numbers, Peter Ryan, a zoologist at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, who is writing a book tracing the evolution of marine debris research, says the problem can be solved.

"Marine debris, unlike global warming, should be an easy thing to deal with," he says. "We have to sort out what to do with our rubbish."

Ryan began tracking debris 30 years ago, after a colleague suggested he should study seabirds that were eating floating plastic pellets, then commonly used in manufacturing and found in harbors and other waterways. Improvements to shipping reduced pellet spillage.

"If you go to the beach today, you struggle to find one," he says. "We can show that in every study that looks at the North Atlantic that the amount of pellets [ingested by] seabirds has decreased over the last two decades."

But gains on that front have given way to losses in others, as microplastics have become more prevalent.

Emily Penn skippers the 72-foot, steel-hulled Sea Dragon, which carries scientists, including Eriksen and Jambeck, on sea trash sampling surveys. She expertly handles the nets trawled behind the vessel and knows what to expect. Nevertheless, she is still surprised and dismayed by the volume of trash.

"The thing that shocks me every time is the fact that the ocean looks like it is clear blue water," she says. "And then ... we pull out that sock at the end of the net and find it's full of thousands of fragments of plastic."

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Ocean Trash: 5.25 Trillion Pieces and Counting, but Big Questions Remain

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The numbers are staggering: There are 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic debris in the ocean. Of that mass, 269,000 tons float on the surface, while some four billion plastic microfibers per square kilometer litter the deep sea. Scientists call these statistics the "wow factor" of ocean trash.

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video.nationalgeographic.com/video/short-film-showcase/are-you-eating-plastic-for-dinner

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How does marine debris harm humans?
How does marine debris harm the ocean ecosystem?
What actions can I take to reduce marine debris?

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Marine debris is any man-made, solid material that enters waterways directly through littering or indirectly via rivers, streams and storm drains. Marine debris can be simple items such as a discarded soda can, cigarette butt, or plastic bag that ends up in the ocean potentially harming marine life. Nearly 80 percent of marine debris originates from land-based sources.

Lost or abandoned commercial and recreational fishing nets, lines, pots, and traps are another form of marine debris, categorized as derelict fishing gear (DFG). These items, whether discarded intentionally or lost accidentally, may sit on the seafloor, get caught on rocky or coral reefs, or float on the ocean surface. The majority of this lost gear does not decompose in seawater and can remain in the marine environment for many years. Often this gear continues to trap and even kill marine animals, a phenomenon known as “ghost fishing.”