Message in a Bottle

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• The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a massive island of floating trash that is twice the sizes of Texas.
• The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is actually comprised of the smaller Eastern and Western Pacific Garbage Patches, which are connected by an ocean current.
• The Great Pacific Garbage Patch went unnoticed for a long time because it is located in the middle of ocean where boats rarely go.
• There are also great garbage patches in the Indian Ocean and the North Atlantic Ocean.

• The Great Pacific Garbage Patch was discovered by Captain Charles Moore in 1997.
• The Great Pacific Garbage Patch didn't exist 30 years ago.
• The Great Pacific Garbage Patch spans 10 million square miles, making it the largest "landfill" on earth.
• The Great Pacific Garbage Patch stretches from California to Japan.

• The Great Pacific Garbage Patch doubles in size every 10 years.
• The Great Pacific Garbage Patch contains 3.5 million tons of waste.
• The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is 90 feet deep in some places.
• The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is known as the 8th Continent.

• More than 90% of the trash in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is plastic.
• There are an estimated 250 billion pieces of plastic in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
• The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is made up of debris including plastic bottles, bottle caps, Styrofoam, plastic bags, plastic toys and candy wrappers.
• Plastic in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is not biodegradable and never fully goes away.

• PCBs, oils and other toxins are released into the ocean as sunlight breaks down plastic in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch into tiny fragments.
• Sea turtles, seals and other marine mammals get tangled in plastic netting and six pack rings in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, causing them to drown.
• Plastic bags in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch are often mistaken for jellyfish and eaten by other sea animals, eventually causing their death.
• Some tiny plastic pieces in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch are consumed by small sea creatures, travel up the food chain and eventually reach our dinner plates.

• The Great Pacific Garbage Patch contains six times more plastic than plankton.
• About one million sea birds die each year because they cannot digest plastic waste mistaken for food in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
• Over one hundred thousand marine mammals die each year because they cannot digest plastic waste mistaken for food in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
• The Great Pacific Garage Patch is held together by a system of slowly rotating ocean currents known as a "gyre."

• The only time trash escapes the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is when it sinks to the ocean floor or is flushed out by a large storm and washes ashore.
• 80% of the trash in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch comes from human land waste.
• 20% of the trash in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch comes from ships that spill their contents.
• The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is too expensive and too difficult to fully clean up because the debris constantly moves around the ocean.

• Any attempt to clean up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch would kill a mass of marine life in the nets needed to collect floating debris.
• Launched in 2009, Project Kasiei is studying the possibility of removing waste from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
• It can take six or seven years for trash to make its way from land to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch via sewers, streams, rivers or the coastline.