Narrator: The world produces enough plastic each year
to build 50 Pyramids of Giza.
That's over 350 million tons of candy wrappers,
PVC pipes, and synthetic T-shirts.
While most of it ends up in landfills,
eight million tons of plastic winds up
in our oceans each year
where most of it finds its way
into massive garbage patches around the world
and the biggest of them all
is called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
If you picked up each piece of plastic
in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch,
you'd carry away about 1.8 trillion individual pieces.
That's 10 times more plastic pieces
than there are stars in our Milky Way Galaxy
and it would weigh a whopping 80,000 tons
equivalent to the weight of three Statues of Liberty.
Half of the entire patch is made
of plastic fishing nets, lines and ropes
which come from intense fishing activity near the area.
The other half is mostly hard plastics and films
like water bottles and plastic wrap
but don't let the name Great Pacific Garbage Patch fool you.
It doesn't look like a giant mountain of trash at all.
It's actually scattered over a region of ocean
that's twice the size of Texas according to some estimates.
So, if you wanted to pick up every piece of plastic,
it would take you 121 days at a walking pace
of five kilometers per hour to cover the entire area.
Though in reality there's no true end
since the garbage patch
is constantly ebbing and flowing with the ocean currents.
But let's pretend we could scoop it all up into one place.
There'd be enough plastic to fill 100 Boeing 747 planes
and the patch is only getting bigger.
It's actually been growing exponentially larger
for nearly 70 years.
Partly because once the plastic is there,
it'll stick around for centuries.
Those plastic fishing lines, for example,
will take 600 years to break down
and even after they break down,
the damage doesn't stop there.
Most end up as microplastics
that are too small to see with the naked eye
but can make it into the bellies
of sea animals and, ultimately, the humans
that will eat those animals.
Worldwide, researchers have found
ingested microplastics in every species
of sea turtle, nearly 60% of whale species
and almost 60% of sea birds.
Plus more plastic is pouring
into the world's oceans each day.
In fact, experts estimate that by the year 2050,
the amount of plastic in the oceans
will outweigh all the world's fish.
Think about that the next time you toss your water bottle
in the trash because the recycling's full.