The Great Pacific Garbage Patch

In January 2022, I started my first job as a brand strategist. I vividly remember being asked a case study question in the interview about what I would do for a brand's social media named "Recircle." I had never heard of it before, and upon researching, I discovered it is a Mumbai-based plastic recycling company.

Little did I know that I would be managing the brand's social media end-to-end for the next eight months. From learning to make designs on Canva to writing content daily, I was fully immersed in the world of sustainability.

Every day, I wrote captions and content focused on plastic recycling and its impact on our planet. This was before the era of ChatGPT, so every single word I wrote (about 100 words each day) was based purely on my knowledge acquisition and community-building efforts, after reading countless articles and Wikipedia pages.

It remains my favourite brand to have worked on, thanks to an amazing and proactive team at Recircle and their extremely particular yet fun marketing manager.

This period wasn't just about professional growth; it was a deep dive into understanding the environmental crisis posed by plastic pollution. One of the most staggering facts that resonated with me was that humans add 300 million tonnes of plastic to our planet every year, yet only 9% of it gets recycled. The rest accumulates in landfills or the environment, breaking down into microplastics and contaminating our food chain, freshwater systems, and air.

Then came the main shock: I heard about The Great Pacific Garbage Patch for the first time. I was stunned as I started Googling it and looked at the pictures and videos.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is essentially a collection of marine debris in the North Pacific Ocean. Sounds like a normal fact, right? Nope. It is actually the largest accumulation of ocean plastic in the world, located between Hawaii and California, covering an estimated surface area of 1.6 million square kilometres, an area three times the size of France.

Marine debris is essentially the litter that ends up in oceans, seas, and other large bodies of water, with around 80% from the shore and 20% from boats and marine sources. But the saddest thing is, The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is not the only marine trash vortex—it’s just the biggest.

To give you a better picture, 100,000 tonnes of plastic float in the GPGP, equivalent to over 740 Boeing 777s. My mind was blown by this number. Has yours been too right now?

Most people imagine an island of trash floating on the ocean. Unfortunately, it's worse. In reality, these patches are almost invisible to the naked eye. Even satellite imagery doesn’t show a giant patch of garbage. This is because plastic simply breaks into tinier and tinier pieces known as microplastics, making the water look like a cloudy soup.

The plastic we use—from takeaway bottles to the cutlery we receive our food in, from laundry detergent containers to plastic wraps, from tiny sachets (did you know that a single sachet is made up of multiple layers of plastic?) to our sanitary pads (an average woman is estimated to use and throw away more than 10,000 pads/tampons in her lifetime)—has been pouring into the world’s oceans, poisoning marine life, sullying beaches, and infamously feeding a garbage patch that’s approximately six times the size of Uttar Pradesh!

The patch was first discovered in 1997 by Charles Moore, a yachtsman who had sailed through a mishmash of floating plastic bottles and other debris on his way home to Los Angeles.

“The interesting piece is that at least half of what they’re finding is not consumer plastics, which are central to much of the current debate, but fishing gear,” says George Leonard, the chief scientist at the Ocean Conservancy.

An estimated 100,000 marine animals are strangled, suffocated, or injured by plastics every year. And it's not just marine animals; these pollutants can also enter the food chain when consumed by marine life.

Even though various non-profit organisations have taken up the task of removing 100,000 kgs of plastic from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (GPGP), it is only nearly 1/1000 of the Patch.

While synthetic fishing nets and marine waste are not within our direct control, scientists and explorers agree that limiting or eliminating our use of disposable plastics and increasing our use of biodegradable resources is the least we can do to clean up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

Together, by making conscious choices, spreading awareness, and supporting sustainable practices, we can contribute to a healthier planet. Every small action counts and our collective efforts can make a significant difference in addressing the plastic pollution crisis. 

Let's be the change our oceans desperately need.

PS: The ending might seem a little too generic and forced but blame the Indian education system for teaching us to end our essays and articles in a positive and hopeful way.