Plastic trash is collecting in vast areas of the north Pacific Ocean and staying there. You get debris that leaves our coastal watersheds, goes out to sea, and gets stuck in the middle. Eriksen said this garbage in the north Pacific is less like a floating island, and more like a soup of plastic. Particles of cups of spoons and knives of plastic bags and plastic bottles, and they get smaller down to the basic plastic polymer, which is microscopic. The circular movement of the ocean in the form of an ocean gyre, is trapping all this plastic. Eriksen spoke of the large rotating ocean gyre that covers much of the north Pacific. Eriksen said the plastic doesn’t fully biodegrade and is often toxic. He said marine life feeds on it, including fish eaten by humans. It’s absorbing other toxins but already out there, things like PCBs, pesticides from farms, oil drops from cars like a sponge. A plastic particle, we have documented, can have up to a million times more pollutants stuck on it than ambient seawater.