The Great Pacific Garbage Patch isn’t just a floating trash pile

Azure waves lapping against huge piles of built-up junk. Garbage mountains rising above the sea. A thick crust of filth coating the ocean’s surface. It’s easy to find striking images of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (GPGP). The problem is that these pictures of the GPGP are misleading and obscure the truth about the content of the GPGP, its origins, and the threat it poses to our ocean life.  

A voyage to the “soup of microplastics”

Visiting the GPGP is not easy. For Bruno Sainte-Rose, a lead computational monitor at The Ocean Cleanup, an organization dedicated to tackling marine waste, a trip begins by boarding a ship at Victoria Harbour in British Columbia. 

Sailing southwest, the first thousand miles of ocean is relatively clear. “Then, all of a sudden, after three and a half days of sailing, you see an increase of debris sightings,” says Sainte-Rose. This junk isn’t piled up on the sea’s surface. Instead, the ocean within the GPGP becomes like a “soup of microplastics,” says Sainte-Rose. Larger objects dot this broth, including tangles of “ghost nets”—thick masses of abandoned fishing gear. The Ocean Cleanup estimates that as much as 86 percent of the plastics in the GPGP come from fishing activity. The nonprofit organization reckons that the GPGP has grown to cover an area of ocean twice the size of Texas. How did this happen? 

Fifty years of trash

As far back as 1973, seafarers traveling through the North Pacific Ocean noticed an unusually high number of man-made objects. While it’s no surprise to find pieces of plastic in our seas—a 2023 study estimated that there are 171 trillion of them—it was surprising to find them so far from any landmass. “The international space station is actually closer to the GPGP most of the time than it is to the rest of human beings,” Sainte-Rose points out. 

The remote area of sea where the GPGP is located is surrounded by the North Pacific Gyre, a network of rotating ocean currents. These ensnare plastic and other debris that enters their flow, gradually moving them across the ocean. Eventually, slowly turning vortexes within the gyre draw in the debris. The GPGP is split into two main areas—the Western Garbage Patch near Japan and the Eastern Garbage Patch between California and Hawaii. While the plastic may subsequently move between these two areas of the GPGP, which change in size and location as time passes, they are unlikely to escape these swirling currents.

The Ocean Cleanup is fighting against this accumulation. In 2024, the foundation removed 11.5 million kilos of garbage from the world’s oceans and rivers. They even put a price tag on cleaning up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. For $7.5 billion, Sainte Rose’s team estimates that the GPGP could be cleared within a decade. 

The plastic ecosystem

Not everyone agrees that cleaning up the GPGP would be the best way to address our oceans’ plastic problem. The Ocean Cleanup uses large net-based systems to dredge junk from the ocean. These nets effectively remove larger plastic items, but over 90 percent of the plastic items in the GPGP are microplastics, less than 5 mm in size. The net system has been designed to be easy for animals to swim out of, but as they suck up larger pieces of plastic from the sea, the Cleanup team also removes animals and microbes that cling on to these items. “You do see a very broad diversity of microorganisms attaching to the plastic,” says Sonja Oberbeckmann, a marine microbiologist at the Federal Institute for Material Research and Testing in Germany. Oberbeckmann says many of these microbes also live on natural materials, but some are “thriving” on plastic particles. 

Sainte-Rose points to evidence that some of these plastic riders are invasive species that shouldn’t be present in the ocean in the first place. Additionally, targeting the GPGP is just one of the Ocean Cleanup’s approaches to their goal of plastic-free waters. Dredge systems installed in polluted rivers halt debris from entering the ocean in the first place.  These coastal cleanups are easier, less expensive proposals for local governments, which are more willing to fund a river-based project that earns them a highly visible environmental win. Securing funding to clean the far-from-home and hard-to-visualize Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a harder sell. 

“It’s everyone’s and no one’s problem, right?” concludes Sainte-Rose. 

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