http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/26/opinion/choking-the-oceans-with-plastic.html

The Opinion Pages | OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

Choking the Oceans With Plastic

By CHARLES J. MOORE AUG. 25, 2014

LOS ANGELES ? The world is awash in plastic. It?s in our cars and our
carpets, we wrap it around the food we eat and virtually every other
product we consume; it has become a key lubricant of globalization ? but
it?s choking our future in ways that most of us are barely aware.

I have just returned with a team of scientists from six weeks at sea
conducting research in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch ? one of five
major garbage patches drifting in the oceans north and south of the
Equator at the latitude of our great terrestrial deserts. Although it
was my 10th voyage to the area, I was utterly shocked to see the
enormous increase in the quantity of plastic waste since my last trip in
2009. Plastics of every description, from toothbrushes to tires to
unidentifiable fragments too numerous to count floated past our marine
research vessel Alguita for hundreds of miles without end. We even came
upon a floating island bolstered by dozens of plastic buoys used in
oyster aquaculture that had solid areas you could walk on.

Plastics are now one of the most common pollutants of ocean waters
worldwide. Pushed by winds, tides and currents, plastic particles form
with other debris into large swirling glutinous accumulation zones,
known to oceanographers as gyres, which comprise as much as 40 percent
of the planet?s ocean surface ? roughly 25 percent of the entire earth.