Garbage: A drop in the ocean

Where does Garbage Island, aka the North Pacific Garbage Patch, come from? Well according to a new peer-reviewed study, over 90% can be traced back to six countries, with China and Japan accounting for ⅔ of the overall total.

🗑️🌊 First things first… The NPGP isn’t a giant floating island of trash, ​​like a garbage dump or a landfill, but an ever-moving area of the Pacific Ocean where garbage has collected and broken down into tiny plastic pieces. These “microplastics” are suspended throughout the water, similar to flecks of pepper in one biiiiiiig bowl of soup.

• The NPGP is estimated to cover an area the size of Texas, Alaska, or twice the continental US, depending on who you ask.

📝 Now, back to the study: A team of Dutch researchers collected, sorted, and studied 6,000 pieces of trash from the NPGP, with a goal of finding each one’s source. After doing so, they discovered the items – at least, the ones they could identify – were 10x more likely to come from fishing activities than land-based activities.

• All six countries identified as the top polluters (Japan, China, S. Korea, the US, Taiwan, and Canada, in that order) have large domestic fishing industries.

📸 The big picture: The world generates 4+ trillion pounds of garbage every year – and only ~1% of it ends up in the ocean. Nearly half of the globe’s trash (44%) comes from the 38 nations in the OECD, while another ⅕ originates in East Asia and the Pacific region.

+Dive deeper: Cleaning up the garbage patches → (The Ocean Cleanup)