Nicknamed the "seventh continent" or “trash vortex" the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is an expanding mass consisting of 1.8 trillion plastic waste pieces in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
According to a study by NGO The Ocean Cleanup, which was published in Scientific Reports in 2018, it covers an area of 620,000 square miles, which is bigger than France, ... Show More
Apr 2023
The Trash Trail: Why is there so much plastic in the ocean?
We use plastic for all kinds of things, from shampoo bottles to glitter. It’s useful but also a danger, because a lot of plastic is ending up in our oceans, where it’s sucked into swirly twirly whirlpools of garbage. The biggest of these is called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. ... Show More
36m 41s
Mar 2024
88. That’s rubbish: How our waste is choking the planet and how we can clean it up
Just ahead of Zero Waste Day, this episode of The Weekly Tradecast talks trash with UNCTAD economist Henrique Silva Pacini Costa. From plastic packaging to fast fashion to car batteries, we have been creating mountains of waste for decades. It’s everywhere – in landfills, in the ... Show More
9m 25s
Oct 2019
Ocean Cleanup’s New Plastic-Catcher … Kinda Already Exists?
A little over a year ago, a group called The Ocean Cleanup launched an unprecedented campaign to rid the seas of plastic, complete with an unprecedented device: a 600-meter-long, U-shaped tube that was meant to passively gather debris in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch for a ship ... Show More
8m 12s
Jul 2017
Is it Time to Ban the Plastic Bottle?
Every single second, 20,000 single-use drinking bottles are sold around the world. That is more than a million pieces of non-biodegradable rubbish produced every minute. And as demand grows in developing economies, so will the mountains of waste, with much of it ending up in the ... Show More
23m 35s