Texas-size trash vortex in the Pacific, scientists say.
"Many people have heard of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch," said Kara Lavender Law, an oceanographer at the American Geophysical Union's 2010 Ocean Sciences meeting in Portland, Oregon.
In some places the students found more than 200,000 bits of trash per square kilometer (520,000 bits per square mile). The vast majority of these fragments come from consumer products that were blown out of open landfills or were tossed out by litterbugs.
Similar surface trawls in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch have found as many as 750,000 bits of plastic per square kilometer (1.9 million bits per square mile), noted marine chemist