A 2025 Update On the Great Pacific Garbage Patch

Written By Lauren Alshab

By Erika Pietrzak, June 28 , 2025

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a swirling plastic wasteland, bigger than France and packed with up to 3.6 trillion pieces of trash. It’s choking sea life, darkening the ocean, and no country wants to clean it up. Most of it comes from everyday plastic waste that never goes away.

Source: NOAA

Eighty percent of plastic in the ocean comes from land-based sources, with the remaining twenty percent from boats and other marine sources. Most of the ocean’s plastic pollution comes from plastic bags, bottles, and cups. Due to plastic’s low cost, durability, and malleability, plastic has been increasingly produced and littered. Plastics have been carelessly discarded since their invention, but accumulate more now than ever before. Not only does this pose a threat to marine life, but also to all life. 

In 1997, Captain Charles Moore sailed from Hawaii to California after a yacht race to discover the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (GPGP). Uniquely, this patch is nearly half synthetic fishing nets, due largely to ocean current dynamics and increased fishing activity in the Pacific Ocean. Due to its remote location, no nation will take responsibility for the patch or for cleaning it up. The National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration estimates that it would require 67 ships an entire year to clean up less than one percent of the GPGP’s mass.

Each year, around two million tons of plastics enter our oceans from rivers. Marine life suffers the consequences with sea turtles mistaking plastic bags for jelly fish and albatrosses confuse plastic resin pellets for fish eggs, feeding them to their young. Sea turtles by the GPGP can have up to 74 percent of their diet made up of plastics. Seals and other marine mammals experience entanglement, particularly in nets and other discarded fishing gear that makes up a significant portion of the GPGP, that can result in significant injury or death. These plastic pieces accumulate exponentially because of their persistence that keeps the same piece of plastic in the patch for the last fifty years.

Source: The Ocean Cleanup

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is actually two different collections of debris centered by the massive North Pacific Subtropical Gyre. The Western patch, located near Japan, and the Eastern patch, located near Hawaii, lie within the North Pacific Subtropical Convergence Zone. Here, warm and cool waters meet from the Southern Pacific and Arctic to create a highway of ocean movement that transports this debris from one patch to another. The North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, a large system of swirling ocean currents, rotates the debris clockwise around an area of approximately 7.7 million square miles. While the inside of this area is peaceful and stable, the debris continuously is pulled inward into the center, where it becomes trapped.

Many plastics are not biodegradable, but break into smaller pieces by a process known as photodegradation. It is these microplastics that make up the majority of the debris patches, creating cloudy water in the area that mixes with the larger items. The thickness of the patch also prevents algae and plankton from reaching sunlight, threatening the base of the entire food chain. This contributes to the global ocean darkening in which 21 percent of the ocean has become darker over the last two decades, profoundly impacting marine life that relies on sunlight.

Source: Keep Knoxville Beautiful

The patch today can be seen by satellite imagery, estimated to weigh over 100 million tons (more than 700 commercial airplanes) and have some portions over 50 feet in length, making it the largest offshore plastic accumulation zone in the world. The current most accurate measurements found that the patch is three times larger than the country of France with 1.6 million square kilometers in known area.

But, the patch may be much larger than our current understanding. Oceanographers recently discovered that seventy percent of marine debris sinks to the ocean floor. Due to its size, the patch cannot be trawled. Recent estimates put a mid-range total of 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic in the GPGP, equivalent to 250 pieces of debris for every person on Earth. On the high end, the estimates have 3.6 trillion pieces of plastic.

When analyzing the kinds of plastic in the GPGP, the wide array of plastic pollution can be seen. 92 percent of the mass’ debris is made up of objects larger than 0.5 centimeters, meaning they are not microplastics. Three quarters of the GPGP’s mass comes from macro- and mega-plastics (larger than five centimeters). However, in terms of content count, 94 percent of the GPGP’s plastic pieces are microplastics. These microplastics are extremely difficult to remove and are often consumed by marine life, harming ecosystems.

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Change The Chamber is a nonpartisan coalition of young adults, 100+ student groups across the country, environmental justice and frontline community groups, and other allied organizations.

Lauren Alshab
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