Plastic never goes away. And it's increasingly finding its way into our oceans and onto our beaches. In the Los Angeles area alone, 20 tons of plastic fragments - like grocery bags, straws and soda bottles - are carried into the Pacific Ocean every day.

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THE PLASTIC PROBLEM

We're surrounded by plastic. Think about every piece you touch in a single day: grocery bags, food containers, coffee cup lids, drink bottles, straws for juice boxes — the list goes on and on. Plastic may be convenient, but its success carries a steep price.

In the first decade of this century, we made more plastic than all the plastic in history up to the year 2000. And every year, billions of pounds of plastic end up in the world’s oceans. 

Most ocean pollution starts out on land and is carried by wind and rain to the sea. Once in the water, there is a near-continuous accumulation of waste. Plastic is so durable that the EPA reports “every bit of plastic ever made still exists.”  

Due to its low density, plastic waste is readily transported long distances from source areas and concentrates in gyres, systems of rotating ocean currents. The North Pacific Gyre, also known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, is twice the size of Texas (and growing) and consists mostly of small plastic particles suspended at, or just below, the surface, where fish and other animals mistake the particles for food.In the Garbage Patch, plastic outnumbers fish food like zooplankton six to one. The Garbage Patch is only one of five such convergence zones, which in total cover 40 percent of the ocean.

Read more here: http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/campaigns/ocean_plastics/index.html