Kamilo Beach Kamilo, on the Big Island of Hawaii, is no ordinary beach. There are no roads that lead to it. There are no sunbathers, no swimmers and no surfers. But the strangest thing about Kamilo is that it’s covered with plastic trash — things that we use every day. The location of Kamilo I find shoes, combs, laundry baskets, toothbrushes and countless water bottles. There are even toys like LEGO. Beneath the recognizable things are millions of tiny, colorful plastic pieces — the fragments of broken-down larger objects. They look like confetti.

A shark carcass on Kamilo Beach, Hawaii, where plastic particles outnumber sand grains until you dig down about 30cm

None of this trash was left by careless beachgoers. It looks like it has spent a long time in the ocean, being tossed about by waves. The objects are faded and brittle and some have big chunks missing.

Plastic trash in the ocean and on beaches harms sea animals of every size. Some eat the trash, thinking it’s food. The animals’ stomachs fill up with garbage, and if they can’t poop it out, they die. Other animals get tangled in the trash and drown. This trash may even contain dangerous chemicals that are making their way into the seafood we eat.

Noni Sanford lives on the Big Island and regularly cleans Kamilo with a group of volunteers. She says that before the cleanups started, the trash was piled 8 to 10 feet high. It’s much better now, but each year, the volunteers still remove between 15 and 20 tons of new trash from Kamilo and other beaches that stretch nine miles up the coast. That’s enough junk to fill 1.5 to two garbage trucks to the brim. “It’s overwhelming,” Sanford says.

How could a beach that no one visits have so much garbage? OCEAN GYRES

A gyre is like a vortex. It is a vast area of water surrounded by a loop of fast-moving ocean currents that is constantly rotating. Strong winds blow into the middle of the vortex. They carry with them trash from the beaches of countries that border the North Pacific — such as the United States, Canada, Mexico, Japan and China. The trash blows into the gyre’s currents. Some trash stays within these currents and can travel for miles and miles, but wind also sweeps a lot of the garbage into the centre of the vortex (gyre).

In the middle of the gyre there is very little wind so the water there is usually calm. Plastic trash carried into the gyre gets trapped going round and round in the vortex. Because most plastic floats, it accumulates at the surface like bubbles in a bathtub. Passing storm winds can lift trash out of the gyre. Because Hawaii is located so close to the Northern Pacific Gyre’s southern edge, storm winds blow trash onto Hawaiian beaches — including Kamilo.

North Pacific Gyre

Hawaii

'Ocean Gyre'

A ring like system of ocean currents that rotate Bellies full of bottle caps

Sea animals eat the plastic, thinking it’s food. To a seabird flying above the ocean, floating plastic trash looks identical to favourite foods like fish eggs and squid. Dead albatrosses have been found in Hawaii with bellies full of cigarette lighters and bottle caps.

To sea turtles, which are endangered, a floating plastic bag looks exactly like jellyfish, their favourite meal. If the turtles’ guts get full of this plastic, which can’t be pooped out, they eventually will die.

Even fish eat plastic. Other researchers recently reported that 35 percent of the lantern fish they caught in the North Pacific gyre had an average of two plastic pieces in their stomachs. Lantern fish are incredibly important because they’re the most common fish in the ocean. Nearly everything eats them, from squid to some types of whales. 2.4 million pounds

A team of scientists has been collecting plastic in the North Pacific for the past 22 years. Using a net, the scientists have gathered more than 6,100 samples.

62% of those samples contained plastic pieces that were 10 millimeters or smaller in size

This means that the pieces were no bigger than a pencil eraser and one- tenth as heavy as a paper clip.

The scientists painstakingly counted each tiny, plastic fragment by hand, using a tool resembling tweezers.

The team estimated that the region contains 2.4 million pounds of plastic.

If all of those plastic pieces were laid across an area the size of a football field, they’d form a layer almost 6 inches deep.

Because those pieces are instead scattered throughout the North Pacific, there are only a few in any one place. That may not sound like much, but the problem with plastic is that it can’t quickly biodegrade, or be broken down by living organisms.

Crashing waves and constant sunlight cause the plastic to crumble into smaller and smaller pieces. Some scientists think the pieces can take hundreds of years to completely disappear. 10 Plastic Water Bottle Facts You Should Know

10. Plastic Bottles Pollute our Beaches Plastic water bottles are one of the main sources of pollution found on beaches. It is not uncommon to find countless plastic water bottles washed ashore, which poses a serious problem to the natural environments of these areas.

9. Plastic Accumulates in our Oceans It is estimated that one tenth of all plastic that is created every year eventually ends up in one of our oceans. Plastic water bottles play a major roll in this staggering statistic.

8. Slow Decomposition Plastic takes much longer to decompose than many other types of rubbish. When plastic water bottles are thrown away, they can literally last for years and years before they finally break down.

7. High Clean Up Costs Plastic water bottles cost money to get rid of. Nationally, we spend staggering amounts of money picking up after people who have littered public areas.

6. Less Incentive to Recycle Because there is no deposit on water bottles, like there is on some other types of beverage bottles, there is a lower incentive for these containers to be recycled. People are less inclined to recycle plastic water bottles, so they get thrown away.

5. Plastic is Costly to Produce According to research, 1.5 million tons of plastic waste are created by plastic bottles alone. These wasted plastic bottles required 47 gallons of oil to produce, in just one year. Plastic bottles that are not recycled waste valuable resources.

4. Pollution from Creating Plastic Water Bottles Because so few plastic water bottles are recycled, many new plastic water bottles must be created each year. In production, more than 800,000 metric tons of harmful pollutants are released into the air, just to replace the plastic water bottles that were thrown away.

3. Plastic Waste Adds Up In 2008, there were over 2,480,000 tons of plastic bottles and other containers that were simply thrown away instead of recycled. Plastic water bottles made up a significant portion of this waste.

2. Low Recycling Rate Only one out of four plastic water bottles that are bought are actually recycled. This means that 75% of the water bottles that are purchased are just thrown out in the garbage, and are taking up space in our landfills, which are filling up quickly.

1. Plastic Trash is a Serious Problem Plastic in the garbage is not only an issue because it could have been recycled. When plastic is just thrown away, the plastic absorbs organic pollutants that were already in existence, thus increasing the overall pollution in a variety of ways. These pollutants get into our soil and water, and eventually get into animals' systems when the animals ingest the water.