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The Great Pacific Garbage Patch has sometimes been described as a "trash island".
We could just go out there and scoop up an island,if it was one big mass, it would make our jobs a whole lot easier."
It’s like a galaxy of garbage, populated by millions of smaller trash islands that may be hidden underwater or spread out over many miles. That can make it maddeningly difficult to study — we still don 't know exactly how big the garbage patch is.
Recent ocean voyages have confirmed the garbage patch covers an enormous area, and despite a lack of cohesion, it is relatively dense in places. Researchers have collected up to 750,000 pieces of microplastic from a single square kilometer, for example, and after conducting the first
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Charles Moore, said a cleanup effort "would bankrupt any country and kill wildlife in the nets as it went."
Still, NOAA conducts flyovers to study the garbage patch, and research teams have sailed there to collect debris and water samples. Scientists from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography held a press conference after returning from a three-week voyage in 2009, describing the amount of trash as "shocking." They found large and small items as well as a vast underwater haze of photodegraded plastic flakes, and continue to study how microplastic interacts with a marine environment.
Another study published in 2014 estimated that Earth 's oceans now contain 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic overall, based on data from 24 trash-collecting voyages over a six-year period. That 's a lot, but it still hasn 't discouraged everyone from trying to clean it up — including the Ocean Cleanup foundation, whose research is part of an elaborate, long-term remediation plan.
Ultimately, even advocates of ambitious cleanup projects acknowledge that more plastic recycling — and wider use of biodegradable materials — is still the best hope for getting ocean plastic under control. Prevention is cheaper and easier, but as Bamford points out, old habits can be hard to