Well, if it floats, there's a good chance trash will find its way to the greatest gathering of garbage the world has ever known. According to Justin Berton's October 19, 2007 article for the San Francisco Chronicle, "Continent-size Toxic Stew of Plastic Trash Fouling Swath of Pacific Ocean," marine biologists describe this lost-and-found of things not wanting to be found as "a heap of debris floating in the Pacific that's twice the size of Texas." Per Berton, the trash collection sits in a rarely traversed segment of the Pacific Ocean between California and Hawaii. Mostly made up of plastics (roughly 80 percent) and other marine life killers (e.g., ghost nets), the floating garbage heap weighs approximately 3.5 million tons. And it's growing.

Scientists have given this waste phenomenon a name, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. It is located in the North Pacific Ocean Gyre, a vortex of converging currents approximately 1000 miles off the coast of California. According to Berton, the Garbage Patch "has been growing, along with ocean debris worldwide, tenfold every decade since the 1950s," with 80 percent of the pollutants originating on land.

How the Great Pacific Garbage Patch Harms Marine Life

According to John Timmer's ARS Technica article, "Floating, Texas-sized Garbage Patch Threatens Pacific Marine Sanctuary," plastic in the patch exists at five kilograms per square kilometer. This figure is nearly six times the density of plankton in the same area. Essentially, when fish surface in order to feed on plankton, they have six times better odds of eating plastic. Animals that eat too much plastic die because they cannot pass it, it fills their stomachs, and they starve to death.