The Garbage Patch

Garbage patches are large sectors within our oceans where pieces of garbage tend to end up. Due to Earth's currents, the ocean debris are pulled into these large whirlpools which pull trash to their center. As a result, the trash winds up staying within that area, and the patch grows bigger as more trash is pulled into it. The most infamous is the Great Pacific garbage patch located between California and Hawaii, which is considered the largest garage patch worldwide. The term garbage patch can be a bit misleading because listeners tend to view a giant island of plastic waste when in all actuality the debris are far apart and scattered. Plastics can be found miles apart from each other or even on the ocean floor. In addition, most of the plastic within the garbage patch is made up of a type of plastic known as 'microplastic'. Microplastics are plastics that are smaller than 5mm (to learn more go to 'The Life Cycle of a Microplastic'). Garbage patches are detrimental to the environment. Besides the obvious concern that we have hunks of trash floating in our waters, other species are affected by our careless actions. For starters floating plastics can result in marine life entanglement. Marine life can be caught within plastic soda rings, plastic bags, even discarded nets, and this can potentially injure and or kill them (for a real-life story go to 'Peanut the Unstoppable Turtle'). In addition, plastic debris can transport invasive species. An animal can latch onto a floating piece of debris and through the ability of Earth's currents get transported to a completely different ecosystem. This becomes problematic because this species no longer has a natural predator limiting its growth. The species can become invasive as it begins to eat all of the food within the ecosystem, which in turn starves the animals natural to that environment. Lastly, fish and other sea creatures ingest plastic within these garbage patches, thus filling their stomachs up with plastic. This can make them feel 'full' even though they have not eaten any real food. In addition, we eat fish and other sea creatures and so, in turn, we are also ingesting plastic at a much higher and toxic level. See the picture below for visual aid.

As you can see the higher you go up the food change the more plastic that is ingested until organisms are ingesting deadly levels of plastic.