I Went to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. This is What I Saw.

Plastic Planet is a series on the global plastics crisis that evaluates the environmental and human costs and considers possible solutions to this devastating man-made problem. In this piece, Alli Maloney, Teen Vogue's Senior Politics Editor, describes her experience in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
A person pulls plastic from the ocean.
A Greenpeace campaigner collects plastic from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in 2018.Tabor Wordelman

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The Great Pacific Garbage Patch (GPGP), a site of marine debris considered to be twice the size of Texas, is perhaps the foremost expression of the impact of plastic waste on our world and the role of humans in environmental degradation.

It has been popularized through media coverage as the world turns its focus to plastic pollution, but misrepresented by misattributed photos that claim to show matted, flat surface debris in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. It is incorrectly believed to be visible from space and described as the “world’s biggest landfill”; a so-called trash vortex where plastic is “piling up.”

But it’s just one manifestation of the many ways man-made environmental destruction has taken phenomenal hold of our natural world. Its alleged dramatic aesthetics fail to fully address the impact of the waste and the root of the global plastics problem. So, to understand its mythology and get to the bottom of what the GPGP really means for the planet, I went to see it for myself.

It takes over one thousand miles from shore to get there, departing from the West Coast and straight into the Pacific. Land fades from sight and the world around the ship becomes only water and sky. I set out this past September from Ensenada, Mexico with a photographer to bear witness as a guest of Greenpeace, the decades-old non-governmental environmental organization whose oceans campaign team conducted research from aboard their icebreaker, the Arctic Sunrise. The 21-day-long expedition at sea shed light on and debunked prevalent ideas — mainly that the ocean, in any part, can be "cleaned up" from the mess humans have made.


We traveled directly toward the gyre, stopping only once for the engineers to make midnight repairs to the ship. Upon arrival, which took days, I expected to see trash everywhere, piled high as I heard it would be. What I saw was different and certainly no island. As Greenpeacers described to me, and as I witnessed, the GPGP is more of a "soupy mixture," with its most buoyant pieces of large, tough plastic joined by fishing debris at the very top of the water's surface and countless microplastics immediately — indefinitely — below. There was no oversized heap like I was expecting. There was no matted debris. Just vast sea, a few seabirds, and a touch of marine life amid a noticeably high concentration of waste.

It’s home to a severe problem and is a visible manifestation of “throwaway” culture, wherein much of our economy and daily lives rely on plastics, most of which are disposed of after one use.

The GPGP was discovered in 1997 by marine researcher Charles Moore and named by oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer. It became known as “Trash Isles,” thanks to a pair of advertisers who appealed to the United Nations to have the area become the world's 196th country on World Oceans Day in 2017. The campaign was marketed well, and public understanding of the GPGP was generally founded on the notion that an “island” of trash had been discovered.

That misconception installed the impression that the impact of plastic pollution will be visible to the eye. The area is in the North Pacific Ocean between California and Hawaii, 1,200 nautical miles offshore, where very few have ventured to bear witness, so widespread misunderstanding persists.

It is in the largest and perhaps most well-known one of the world’s five ocean gyres, or systems of circulating ocean currents. It is one of three major “garbage patches” found within these gyres where, over time, plastic debris has coalesced. The mass of trash hits its peak in the center of the GPGP’s most concentrated area, which fluctuates with conditions. Ships can enter easily, but even in its outermost zones, floating plastic debris appears with great frequency.

U.S. actions director for Greenpeace Katie Flynn-Jambeck holds up plastic recovered from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch to show campaigners on board the Arctic Sunrise.

Tabor Wordelman

With the ship slowed down from its usual nine knots, the Greenpeace team spent an hour each day with a special trawl net lowered into the water. We’d sift the plastic pieces that were caught and pick them out of a tray and onto a gridded sheet to be counted and examined one by one, using tweezers. (The process, which feels endless, was oddly satisfying.) Members of the oceans campaign team then documented and packaged up the day’s tiny finds to be sent to partner scientists to study and ideally trace back to a particular product or brand. On our first day of the 60-minute practice, 1,119 pieces were captured and cataloged.

To better visualize what that looks like below the surface, they also needed to send divers. Tavish Campbell was one of two aboard the Sunrise and tasked with filming underwater. Before the trip, he’d seen “images in the media which made [the GPGP] look like a massive island you could walk on,” he tells Teen Vogue. “I had prepared myself to see vast tidelines of plastic floating on the surface, complete with entangled sea creatures, but what we actually found was a far different story.”

Instead, he encountered a seascape that he describes as “sinister”: a vast expanse of pristine-looking ocean found to be “awash in trillions of micro-fragments of plastic” below the water.

“Every time I ducked under the surface into the bottomless blue, I could see tiny pieces of plastic drifting around me, some smaller than sesame seeds and hardly identifiable, but always present,” Campbell says. “I have dove along shorelines thick with plastic garbage in the western Pacific and have witnessed the careless dumping of garbage closer to home in the eastern Pacific, but seeing the GPGP really linked it all together for me and offered a startling realization: There is no ‘away’ when something drifts away. It just heads toward the closest ocean gyre.”

Greenpeace campaigners sort microplastics pulled from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in 2018.

Tabor Wordelman

The majority of the plastic in the ocean eventually sinks. Smaller pieces floats to the top, like those Campbell saw. This fragmented plastics problem is pervasive in ocean and drinking water around the world, Greenpeace senior oceans campaigner David Pinsky tells Teen Vogue. So much so, he says, that “the Environmental Protection Agency’s samples [from its] water on site, had microplastics in it.”

Microplastics — which, as they sound, are miniature pieces of plastic less than five millimeters long — have been found in human feces, as we eat them in fish and most table salts. While systems of measurement have not yet been established to unify the world’s research, in the GPGP, microplastics have been found to make up 94% of the pieces of plastic in the gyre.

Free-roaming man-made plastic matter can devastate the earth. It can lodge itself onto or into sea life not meant to carry or eat it, which can get stuck inside their bodies or cause choking. Microplastics are consumed by wildlife at high rates, with a recorded impact on at least 800 species, including half of the world’s sea turtles and an estimated 60% of all seabird species, a figure predicted to reach 99% by 2050. Plastic ruins soil, leaching contaminants into the ground and waterways, and encourages pathogen growth, which can destroy reefs. When plastics large or small decompose in the sun, they release greenhouse gases that further advance climate disaster.

When we on the ship weren’t trawling, we’d keep watch for plastic from its side during the day or hit the sea in smaller boats to pull bigger pieces that were potentially branded or stamped and could lead to corporate accountability — a major part of Greenpeace’s current mission, which asks the world to consider what “thrown away” actually looks like. Water samples were also taken in search of microfibers three to five times a day.

A special trawl net used to collect microplastics from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is lifted from the Pacific Ocean and onto Arctic Sunrise, a Greenpeace ship.

Tabor Wordelman

Microfibers are a major part of the plastics crisis, but only recently discussed. These microscopic particles, which shed from textiles and are not visible to the human eye, pollute a majority of the world’s tap water and is commonly found in bottled water (in the U.S., 94% of tap water samples in one study included the fibers). They come from both natural materials (like cotton) and synthetic (like spandex) and are “smaller than a human cell,” Pinsky says. The impact of synthetic fibers on human health is still unknown but being investigated, though it’s already clear that the chemicals that make plastic are endocrine disrupting compounds, which can mess with human hormones, manipulate the functions of organs, and are said to even influence the presence of ADHD in children.

While fragmented microplastics and minuscule microfibers are still being researched, we already know that the sheer volume of pollution they contribute to and represent is disrupting the planet. It’s why many reject the notion that the ocean can be “cleaned up” by simply scooping up the plastic and carrying it back to shore. (A highly publicized, extremely expensive “cleanup” effort has even been set into motion by The Ocean Cleanup, a Dutch nonprofit, to little-reported success thus far.) There is simply too much plastic and most of it too small to capture.


Not all plastic in the water is micro; there is material you can see with your eyes, which gathers in the GPGP and can’t be missed on beach shores around the world. We noted these from the side of the ship during most daylight hours. Talking at sunset one day with engagement coordinator Dan Cannon about his career with Greenpeace, which started when the young organizer was a student, conversation was frequently interrupted to keep count — “another one,” “there’s two more” — of the plastic we’d speed past.

Rosy Vilela, radio operator aboard Greenpeace's Arctic Sunrise ship, and Myriam Fallon, a deckhand operating a rigid-hulled inflatable boat (RHIB). Both were photographed in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch during a 2018 expedition.

Tabor Wordelman

Life aboard a ship is equal parts exhilarating and exhausting. Living on the Sunrise gave me abs — as an icebreaker, it both pitches and rocks side to side, so much so that the crew calls it “the washing machine,” and I was constantly holding on or gripping to stay steady. Each day, we’d get a 7:30 a.m. wakeup call in our bunk beds from Myriam or Robin, two millennial Americans who worked night watch while we slept. Chores were at eight, lunch at noon, and dinner at six, with all meals prepared by Daniel, a talented chef from Mexico City, with help from Amanda, a Hawaiian punk who runs a kayak shop in Seattle, or Pablo, a deckhand from Argentina.

The sea belongs to no country — it’s an international rule — and the Greenpeace team embodied the notion that our environmental efforts should not either. Our radio operator, Rosy, hailed from Brazil, and Cat, the Italian medic, speaks six languages. The first, second, and third mates were from Finland, South Korea, and South Africa. Other crew and campaigners onboard represented Chile, Bulgaria, New Zealand, Canada, Belgium, Great Britain, and France.

In the GPGP’s most concentrated zones, we’d venture out at least once a day in the smaller vessels that the Sunrise housed, lowered into the water by crane with a driver already inside (passengers would get into them through a door on the side of the ship, where we’d hold onto a rope ladder and jump in backward). I found myself with my hands in the sea, pulling out toilet brush handles, bleach bottles, laundry baskets, a suspension band usually found in hard hats. There was a disposable razor handle, hydrogen peroxide container, toolbox top, flower pot, water cooler lid, luggage wheel, buckets, a VHS cassette box with a fish inside of it, an unopened bottle of carbonated water, and a piece of Astroturf. White objects were the easiest to spot, but it came in all colors and shapes, fully intact, visibly torn.

A Greenpeace campaigner scrubs a buoy pulled from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in 2018.

Tabor Wordelman

The team recovered countless buoys, some as big as a beach ball, others small and compact. These were markers of the fishing industry’s impact on the ocean, which weighs heavily. According to Ocean Cleanup, nearly 50% of the patch’s total plastics tonnage is largely accounted for by fishing gear like plastic-lined nets that have been dumped in or drifted out to sea, with much floating toward the area after Japan’s 2011 tsunami. The Sunrise’s motorized crane lifted these “ghostnets” when we chose to stop and pull one from the water (an impressive, upsetting sight). Fish were to be pulled from the piles and thrown back. Crabs — of which there were varied species, riding on nearly every piece of plastic we pulled from the water — scuttled off, sealing their own fate.

It was hard to not feel the monumental weight of human failure as I spent day after day in the GPGP. Early on in the trip, U.S. actions director for Greenpeace Katie Flynn-Jambeck warned that “we might all cry” when we got there, and she was right. I did. I felt hopeless standing Starboard-side on the Sunrise, counting my 97th piece of large plastic spotted in two hours on watch. Counting and organizing hundreds upon thousands of microplastics, tiny fragments that came bleached white, hot pink, and robin’s egg blue alongside tiny bits of broken-down rope, I found myself thinking about the caps of pens, lids of yogurt, Barbie cars — plastic, everywhere, across the landscape of my life.

This realization was painfully reinforced when I was off the ship and hyper-aware of each product I saw in for sale back home in New York City, where throwaway culture is key. While there have been proposals of banning plastic bags statewide and plastic straws in the city, the continued manufacturing and mass use of these will continue to pose economic and environmental issues for this other island of trash, where non-recycled plastic is either buried or shipped to landfills in other states.

Teen Vogue editor Alli Maloney jumps from the Arctic Sunrise into a rigged-hulled inflatable boat (RHIB) used to recover plastics from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

Tabor Wordelman

The solution, many experts now say, is to drastically slow down its production and consumption.

Plastics in the form of reusables like bottles and containers came into prominence among consumer goods after World War II as industries saw dollar signs and used chemicals to introduce new, cheap alternatives to other man-made products, which took skilled labor and natural materials to create. Today, we create 300 million tons of plastic every year, half of which is for single use. We rely on it it every day, in the clothes we wear, in our classrooms and offices, when eating pre-packaged food and beverages, or shipping products by mail.

Long before it makes its way into a gyre, plastic causes problems. The creation of plastic products and its chemicals relies on fossil fuels, most of which are extracted from the earth in a ruinous process known as fracking. It is transformed through refinement for use, which contributes to global warming through leaks. It travels by way of pipelines, which are implanted into predominantly poor communities that are often exposed to pollutants. Plastic production itself is carbon-heavy and releases toxins into the environment. The facilities required for its creation are often built along waterways, which can flood in extreme weather and cause additional damage.

From start to never-end, plastic is dangerous. It demands land for resource extraction, production facilities, and waste storage, which has violent implications for indigenous, marginalized, and impoverished communities.

As the problem intensifies, the most commonly proposed solutions are outdated. Recycling is important, but it is not enough to negate the impact of manufactured plastics on the environment: Only 9% of all plastic ever created has been. Packaging, which makes up for about a quarter of the total volume of all plastics used, is harder to recycle, as are colored plastics. (Biodegradables often need to be processed in facilities, too.) In the extremely frequent instance that a plastic material can’t be recycled — an incineration process that requires energy and emits pollutants — it’s dumped into a landfill, where it will contaminant for more than 1,000 years, or shipped from wealthy countries to others with less economic stability or political influence. People in these spaces pay the price of litter, pollution, and poisoning. Take for example, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Sri Lanka: these are among the top countries considered “responsible” for marine debris, but are also some of the countries that receive much of the world’s trash (and are then blamed for “mismanagement” of the overwhelming volume).

The politics of plastic are nuanced, and to deter the global crisis means to look beyond the recycling bin and toward “the corporations that got us into this mess,” Pinsky says. “Companies have gotten [used to] a certain way of doing business and actually are pushing the cost off onto us, onto the commons, to our environment, into public health.”

The plastics industry reportedly knew it was polluting the oceans back in the 1950s, but only increased production, keeping consumers in the dark, Pinsky says. It has had great influence over regulations, been on the receiving end of subsidies, and long-held, widespread lobbying power and deep government ties. Just like the plastics industry, the U.S. government appears to deny that the synthetics are related to health problems.

Up until this year, the U.S. sold its recyclable trash to China, exporting 16 million tons in 2016. President Donald Trump failed to acknowledge that decades-long relationship (which also has economic ties) when blaming China for the ocean’s plastic crisis while signing legislation in October, pledging a commitment to “clean [them] up." “As president, I will continue to do everything I can to stop other nations from making our oceans into their landfills,” he said.

In the same year, United States and Japan were the only two nations that refused to join the G7 Ocean Plastics Charter, a pledge to work toward 100% recyclable, reusable, and recoverable plastics and increase recycling by 50% by 2030. The Trump administration has shown no signs of slowing down the source of the crisis: the plastics industry. In fact, it has displayed quite a bit of support, from its move to reallow plastic bottles in national parks to environmental policy rollbacks that mark a committed partnership with the fossil fuel industry.


Nets pulled from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

Tabor Wordelman

The industry is made up of everyday brands that are responsible for manufacturing billions of plastics and plastic packaging each year, largely single-use. There is little to no transparency as to exactly how much they create or distribute. An audit of plastic debris collected from six continents by the Break Free From Plastic movement, a group of over 1,400 organizations, found the world’s biggest polluters to be a who's-who of consumer culture. (Some of these brands spoke with Teen Vogue about their plans to combat the plastics problem in an additional story for this series, expressing “ambitious goals” to use reused plastic content or biodegradable products, but no plans to create less overall.) In the GPGP we pulled from the water still-branded, fully-intact plastic vessels for items readily available at most pharmacies and convenience stores, products I'd repeatedly purchased and enjoyed prior to the trip.

Plastic seems unavoidable, especially when buying food at the grocery store, but Pinsky explains that the shop itself and the brands it stocks can avoid it and offer alternatives. Greenpeace has asked major supermarket chains to consider a full audit of all plastic products in their stores — a daunting, “almost impossible” task that gets them thinking about the overall issue. (Pinsky encourages those interested in combating plastics to hold their local chains accountable, too.)

Grocery stores have adapted before. Pinsky worked on Greenpeace’s 2018 Carting Away the Oceans report, which has audited major chains for their seafood sustainability since 2008. The campaign has seen major changes happen over time, largely thanks to consumers and activists holding corporations responsible. All retailers in the first report received failing grades. By this year, 20 out of 22 passed, though at time of its publication, none of the profiled retailers had “major, comprehensive commitments to reduce and ultimately phase out their reliance on single-use plastics.” Change could be on its way, however: Just after the report was released in August, Kroger Co. (which operates multiple store banners such as Kroger, Ralphs, and Harris Teeter) promised to nix plastic bags in all of its stores by 2025 and plans to "divert 90% of [its] waste from the landfill” by 2020. Pinsky says that to show true commitment, a comprehensive plan to reduce single-use plastic must be released, too.

Greenpeace crew and campaigners sit aboard the back deck of the Arctic Sunrise in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in 2018. Strapped to the deck are nets and plastics recovered from the ocean.

But as for the companies producing the products found on those store shelves, few attempts have been made to develop major innovative solutions, despite the well-documented problem. Pinsky says that if the grocery stores they’ve worked with are any indicator, it’s in their best interest for leaders of every industry to start working on a fix to move away from fossil-fuel based plastics, and soon — their competitors may already be doing so because it’s what this new generation of consumers demands. Meanwhile, their products, either plastic or packaged in plastic, are marketed to consumers as safe to use despite major and minor varied risks associated with its use.

Some company leaders are starting to look at recycled ocean-bound plastic as a source material because it’s smart for their business’s bottom line. HP and IKEA, for example, are both part of NextWave Plastics, a global business consortium focused on keeping plastics “in the economy and out of the ocean” that also includes Dell and General Motors. (IKEA has also promised to phase out all single-use plastics by 2020.) Beauty brands are starting to do the same. Food and fashion are both beginning to get creative to avoid contributing further to the epidemic as well.

Plastics pulled from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in 2018.

Tabor Wordelman

Consumers have been putting the pressure on corporations to change production practices, including many young people rising to the challenge. “The brands that young people care about, those brands care about them and are trying to deliver products […] and be hip and socially responsible as well, because they know that young people care about this,” Pinsky says. “Younger generations can say, ‘enough is enough.’”

Teen activists have organized their communities in demanding alternatives in schools and local businesses, and can call them out at any time on social media when they see branded plastic in a waterway or natural space, Pinsky says. In addition to bearing witness up close, organizations like Greenpeace are applying pressure in a myriad of ways, including a petition that asks major companies like Coca-Cola, Starbucks, and PepsiCo to “invest in alternatives and phase out single-use plastic.”

Its time for protests and bans, to demand action from our lawmakers — and it’s on us, a world of people who’ve been conditioned to rely on plastics, to stand up in our own defense.


What you won’t hear about the GPGP is that it’s remarkably beautiful. That far out at sea — no distinct matted island in sight — the water is purple at its stillest, with neon ice-white-and-blue curls when crashing. It was refreshing to stand on the deck and imagine all the Pacific Ocean travelers before us; I found it romantic, as nature should be. But with each floating piece and microscopic sample, I was snapped out of my daydreams and faced again with the environmental crisis that modern humans have caused.

Plastic is unnatural and felt so there, as it does when seen in stream beds or forests. It’s simply en masse, therefore dramatic, in this part of the world. Facing the world’s crisis in its farthest-reaching corner forced me to remember our place and time in history. I could not walk across an “island,” but I saw devastation in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch that imposed deep shame. Plastics are everywhere, ranging the gamut of size, more destructive and distressing than I'd ever imagined.

Without any immediate and drastic change to the way we produce and consume plastics, by 2050, production is expected to have quadrupled. This will exacerbate the ongoing climate crisis, running parallel alongside a projection that assumes average global warming since pre-industrial levels could be about twice what it is now by then, too. Substantial transformation will take mass participation from individuals, governments, and industries. The damage and impact of plastic pollution is clear, but re-envisioning the future of consumption is an uncharted path. To activists like those in Greenpeace, it means seeing plastic as trash before it hits the Great Pacific Garbage Patch — while it’s still on shelves, in every new beverage bottle or trinket we buy — and rejecting what’s become normalized for something new: a plastic-free world.

For more information on the global plastics crisis, read the rest of the Plastic Planet series.