Picture yourself sailing over the ocean blue and coming across a patch of plastic garbage that is twice the size of Texas. No, this is not the setting of some post-apocalyptic thriller. Discovered in the early 80s and now referred to as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, this 600,000 square mile stretch of ocean between Hawaii and California is the world’s largest accumulation of ocean plastic. When you consider the vastness of the ocean — all 140 million square miles of it — it’s unsettlingly easy to see why this “garbage island” has historically been impossible to keep close tabs…

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