• Not one square mile of the ocean is free of plastic

• About 17.6 billions of pounds of plastic (nearly the weight of 57,000 blue whales) are floating around freely in the oceans

  • But more than half of the ocean's plastics reside on the seabed

  • They make up over 70% of what's found on the seafloor, meaning it's unlikely we will ever be able to clean it up

• Because of ocean tides, plastics build up in gyres, or "patches"

  • There are five main "patches", with the biggest being the Great Pacific Garbage Patch between Hawaii and California

  • This patch stretches 617,763 square miles (twice the area of Texas) and contains an estimated 1.8 trillion pieces of trash

• Every piece of plastic ever made throughout history still exists today, and the majority of it resides in the ocean

• Plastics in the ocean often break down into microplastics, which are ingested by smaller fish, who are eaten by larger fish, and so on up the food chain

  • Microplastics are contaminating the food chain, so when you eat seafood you could be eating plastic and not even know it

  • There are so many pieces of microplastic in the ocean, that they outnumber the amount of stars in the entire Milky Way galaxy

• 80% of pollution in the ocean originally comes from land, and 80% of that comes from just 20 countries, one of them being the United States

• The oil spills we hear about on the news make up only 12% of the oil in oceans, 3 times that amount is carried out to the ocean via road runoff, waterways and drainpipes

• The number of hypoxic areas, aka "dead zones", in the ocean is rapidly increasing

  • There were 405 known "dead zones" as of 2008, a huge increase from the 146 only 4 years prior

  • In 2017, oceanographers detected a New Jersey sized dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, making it the largest dead zone ever measured

Click on each organizations logo and it will bring you to their website where you can learn more and support their ocean conservation efforts!