The typical American creates around 4.9 pounds of trash each day, on average. It can be found nearly everywhere in our daily lives.
Unfortunately, our disposable waste is now also a ubiquitous feature of many marine environments — and scientists across the globe have the unenviable task of puzzling out just how much has wound up in the oceans. The answer? Well, it’s complicated.
“This is a difficult question,” says Laurent Lebreton, head of research at The Ocean Cleanup, an organization that works to find solutions to ocean pollution. “Scientists have mapped the mass of plastics at the ocean surface with global estimates reaching several thousand tons of floating plastics.”
Firstly, ocean trash is by and large made up of plastics, accounting for around 80 percent of it. Some estimates state there are tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of tons of plastic in the oceans. In 2014, the ...
