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| The Great Pacific Garbage Patch |
 Twice the size of Texas, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch - a giant floating debris field in the Pacific Ocean - consists of 80 percent plastics and weighs roughly 3.5 million tons.
The Patch floats where humans rarely travel, a no-man's land between San Francisco and hawaii. "With the winds blowing in and the currents in the gyre going circular, it's the perfect environment for trapping,"" Marcus Eriksen, director of research and education at the Algalita Marine Research Foundation, told the San Francisco Chronicle. "There's nothing we can do about it now, except do no more harm."
Growing tenfold every decade since the 1950s, the patch, as well as ocean debris worldwide, is made of refuse almost entirely generated on land. 80 percent of the oceans' litter originates on land according to Greenpeace's "Plastic Debris in the World's Oceans" report.
"At this point, cleaning it up isn't an option," Chris Parry, public education program manager with the California Coastal Commission, said. "It's just going to get bigger as our reliance on plastics continues...The long-term solution is to stop producing as much plastic products at home and change our consumption habits."
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch poses a particular danger to birds and marine life. Sea turtles think that plastic bags are jellyfish. Birds swallow indigestible bits of plastic. The floating petroleum-based plastics, which can take decades to degrade, appear to be feeding grounds as they float on the surface.
"These animals die because the plastic eventually fills their stomachs," said Warner Chabot, vice president of the Ocean Conservancy, an environmental group. Chabot says that an international effort to remove the patch would cost billions of dollars. That is unlikely, he says, because no country is willing to step forward and claim responsibility for the site.
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