Plastic Paradise: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch

There's a dead bird over there.

Let's see if there's anything in there.

Ugh. Oh, my gosh.

Ohh, gross!

You see a piece of plastic there?

Ohh.

There's a bigger piece of plastic coming out.

Here you have a bird that was alive

potentially yesterday,

and you look inside,

and it's just like night and day.

And this is an average amount of plastic in this chick.

Announcer: Plastic. Plastic. Plastic.

Something new... a resin which can be molded

by heat and pressure to any shape.

Angela sun: At the dawn of the 20th century,

science invented synthetic plastics,

and the world would never be the same.

¶ There are plastics in your toaster ¶

¶ in the blender and the clock ¶

¶ in the lamp and in the roaster ¶

today, everywhere we go,

we are surrounded by plastic.

We drink from it, eat from it, wear it

and use it in almost every part of our daily lives.

This miraculous invention and its evolution

have created a new era of cheap, convenient

and disposable products

that have transformed the way we live.

And it's hard to imagine what we would do without them.

Plastics is too firmly embedded in modern life.

But plastic is unlike any other substance on earth

for one very specific reason...

It never goes away.

What happens to plastic when it gets thrown away?

It's forever, it doesn't degrade.

Well, I've never seen it disintegrate.

Where do you think it goes when you throw it away?

Nowhere. It never goes away.

Do you know what plastic is made out of?

Plastic? I don't know.

You melt it down from something.

Any guesses what plastic's made out of?

Wow.

Yes. That is wrong.

The animal kingdom?

No.

The vegetable kingdom?

No.

Then it's just gotta belong to the mineral kingdom.

Uh-uh. It's not a mineral, either.

Oh, a thimble!

Maybe this little thimble

belongs to a kingdom all of its own.

The fourth kingdom.

The kingdom of plastics.

Plastics?

Sun: Because plastic is such a perfect creation,

it's virtually indestructible,

which means that almost every molecule of plastic ever created

is still somewhere on this planet.

So if it never deteriorates, where does it go?

Have you heard of the great pacific garbage patch?

No, I haven't.

No. No. No.

Uh, the great pacific garbage... what?

My name is Angela sun.

I've never been much of an environmentalist,

or what some may call crunchy or granola,

but ever since I was a kid, I've been fascinated

by the ocean and everything in it.

I grew up on the beaches of California...

Swimming, snorkeling,

then surfing and scuba diving.

With new technology,

you can pretty much surf anywhere.

When I got into media and journalism,

i was always interested in telling stories

that involved the water.

So a few years ago, when I heard people talking

about this supposed island of garbage

floating somewhere out in the pacific,

i was immediately intrigued.

I mean, I was used to seeing trash on the beaches,

and sometimes even floating in the waves,

but an island?

Despite the fact that there were a few articles

that mentioned this island,

there were conflicting reports

about what it was, where it was

and how big it was.

Even people who had heard of it

seemed to have different ideas about it.

What is it?

It's an island of trash.

Tiny little micro-pieces of plastic.

It's, like, the size of Texas.

It's that big, right there.

Can you walk on it?

I know it exists.

I know a little bit about it.

But I don't know its origins, not at all.

Sun: If garbage island was indeed real,

i wanted to see it for myself.

As I did more research,

i found that there is a tiny piece of land

in one of the most remote places on earth

that held the key.

It's a difficult place to get to.

And even though it's in the middle of nowhere,

the area is controlled by the U.S. government,

and access to it is restricted.

But I wasn't going to give up,

so I applied for the necessary permits and permissions.

Getting through all the red tape

was a process that took nearly three years.

And just when I thought all hope was lost,

everything came together.

Right now we are in a private airport in Honolulu,

and we are about to get on board

and flatfour hours on a prive chartered flight

to midway atoll right here,

which is literally in the middle of the pacific ocean,

midway point from the west coast of the U.S.

And the east coast of Japan.

Only one government plane flies out there every couple of weeks,

carrying supplies along with researchers and maintenance workers.

I feel like I'm in a dark sauna.

No cars are allowed here,

so transportation is by foot or golf cart.

As we drove to our accommodations,

i realized right away that getting around this place

is harder than it seems.

There are birds everywhere.

We're trying to dodge them in the dark.

Aah! Whoa! Oh, my...

Midway is best known for its instrumental role in world war ii.

On June 7, 1942,

the allied forces defeated the Japanese

and gained control of the pacific,

turning the tide of the war.

Located at the top of papahanaumokuakea marine monument,

it is home to a vast array of wildlife.

More than 2 million albatross

next here for part of the year.

That's about 70%

of all the laysan albatross in the world.

There's no one in sight

except for me and you and the albatross.

And a whole lot of plastic.

In this small, remote place

with very few people,

tens of thousands of pounds of garbage

wash up on our beaches every year.

We clean it up,

so this'll be just the accumulation in four months' time.

What is this?

Looks like a melted piece of... plastic.

It looks like plastic spaghetti.

What the heck is a computer monitor doing

floating in the ocean in the middle of the pacific?

Check it out. It's got Korean writing on it.

And mixed into all of this stuff

is bird feathers and bird bones.

Brown: We've seen debris that comes from north America,

from Asia, from lighters to bottle caps

to, uh, propane tanks

to truck tires.

I can't move it.

That garbage is coming from the big population centers of the world,

and it is definitely collecting here

in the middle of the pacific.

It turns out the truth behind garbage island

is stranger than the myth.

The request is always for a picture

of the island of garbage,

the trash island,

and there is no such island.

Uh, the debris is dispersed...

I mean, let's talk about the largest single feature

on our planet,

which is the north pacific ocean.

Captain Charles Moore discovered the garbage patch

in the late 1990s

d founded the algalita marine research organization

to study it.

Well, ocean basins are like a bathtub.

You can .Ink of them that way

the ocean's currents in the pacific

move in a giant circle known as a gyre,

kind of like a slow-motion whirlpool

or a toilet flushing.

So, over time, all of the debris

that washes into the sea from the coasts

of economic giants north America and Asia,

or from ships,

collect in a centralized zone

from somewhere around twice the size of Texas

to the size of the entire continental United States.

The reason why there aren't any pictures of it