Floating Trash

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch may be the most infamous of the world's floating [trash:waste] dumps. But it's far from the only one. There's plastic trash littering "the Bay of Bengal, the Mediterranean Sea, the coast of Indonesia, all five subtropical gyres; coastal regions, enclosed bays, seas and gulfs." Marcus Eriksen, director of [research:technology] at the Five Gyres Institute.Eriksen surveyed those areas, [along:belong] with his seafaring colleagues. Collectively, they spent some 900 hours logging every large piece of plastic they could spot from their boats. And they trawled for plastic nearly 700 times along the way, picking through their nets and cataloguing the debris. "I find the necks of bottles, I find fragments of [toothbrushes:tools] and combs. Action figure parts. Army men. I find a lot of army men."The [researchers:farmers] plugged that trash census data into ocean models, which simulate the circulation of the world's waters. Based on the densities of trash the researchers found, the models predicted some 5.25 [trillion:million] particles of plastic may be floating out there...adding up to about 269,000 tons.