in the middle of the Pacific Ocean over 1,000 kilometers from land there is a floating island of plastic trash said to be twice the size of Texas we wanted to find out what is really out there how big it is and what impact it's having on wildlife and the oceans so we joined up with the team of scientists on a sailing expedition across the Pacific what we discovered was more disturbing than anything we could have imagined welcome to our plastic ocean everyone I'm Tyler and this is my younger brother Alex and together we're the water brothers we're gonna take you on an adventure around the world to explore the state of our blue planet a planet defined by water and its ability to sustain life so join us in our journey as we explore the world looking at the most important water stories of our time and together we will learn how to better protect our most precious resource [Music] our journey to the Garbage Patch began in the remote Marshall Islands a nation of over 1,000 small islands in the South Pacific once used as an important staging ground for the American Navy in World War two the remnants of its military past were everywhere today the most visible legacy of American influence is the endless supply of imported plastic products scattered all across its shorelines the Marshall Islands have joined the modern world of disposable plastic but with no capacity to recycle the main island of Majuro is so small there was no where to bury the waste even the coral reefs had become a dumping ground for plastic as a washed out to sea the Marshall Islands are home to only 50,000 people and they could not create such a massive Garbage Patch by themselves every country on Earth big or small rich or poor is contributing to the plastic trash on the planet and in the oceans plastic lasts forever and if it's not recycled or properly disposed of it can easily wash down storm drains into lakes and rivers and then out to sea after all the ocean is downstream from everyone now it was time for us to get on board and see what is happening to plastic once it leaves land and reaches the open ocean to journey to the middle of the Pacific we would be sailing a 72 foot steel hauled yacht called the sea dragon it was built for one of the great around the world sailing races and was designed to handle some of the oceans worse conditions so we're just leaving majora right now we can't help but notice all the tuna fishing boats that were surrounded by it and it's a little bit ominous because we know that on our journey we're going to be encountering a lot of fishing nets that've been discarded from boats just like these joining us on our expedition was a diverse group of 14 people that included scientists students sailors and even business leaders from the plastics industry leading our team was dr. Marcus Ericsson co-founder of the research organization 5 gyres who is dedicated over seven years to the study and elimination of plastic pollution in the oceans so right now in the Marshall Islands and we're gonna go about 2,400 miles to Tokyo in between we're gonna hit the Western Garbage Patch the North Pacific Gyre driven by wind and the force of the Earth's rotation gyres are part of a complex network of currents that circulate water all around the world and rotate in a clockwise direction in the Northern Hemisphere and counterclockwise in the southern hemisphere there are five large gyres in the world's oceans - in the Pacific - in the Atlantic and one in the Indian Ocean so these five subtropical gyre zhh make up roughly 40% of the oceans which in turn make up roughly 20% of planet surface these gyres are also accumulation zones for floating trash so things like like blasts light bulbs fluorescent tubes metal if they're closing air like a propane tank or plastics a lot of plastics tires are the natural forces that collect and push floating debris into concentrated areas but plastic is not natural it does not biodegrade so as plastic debris is pulled in by the gyres it can remain trapped there for decades or longer being pushed in a slow spiral all right well top and I have never in this far away from land before or at sea for this long so ya know we're really excited together surprise exactly for surprise hopefully not too much seasickness as well there was no turning back and hopefully we didn't forget to bring anything because we would not see land for nearly three weeks [Music] scientists had long predicted that flowing debris could be accumulating in areas like the North Pacific Gyre but it wasn't until 1997 that a boat captain named Charles Moore stumbled upon what would come to be known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch when he switched on the engines of his catamaran and took a shortcut on his way home to California from Hawaii it was a decision that would change captain Moore's life forever and it was because we took that shortcut that I got involved in this plastic pollution issue because I couldn't come on deck without seeing plastic pollution no matter what time I came on deck if I just stood there and looked into the water for a short while I would see something plastic floating by so this started working on me it wasn't like an aha moment oh I found the Garbage Patch there's a trash island it was day after day hour after hour time after time happening to see something floating by that didn't belong there captain Moore kept returning to the gyre to document how much plastic was actually out there and used his findings to educate the public on each trip wore a new colleagues like Marcus Ericsson were able to perfect a method for gathering data by modifying trawling devices normally used to study plankton so we just put it in our first trawl 24 plastic in the ocean here a little bit about this trawl because they know we have two different types of trials on board yeah so this is the high speed trawl so typically oceanographers deploy a manta trawl the slow speed like two or three knots to skin the sea surface and they'll pick it up and they'll go like 50 60 miles the next trawl all that time in-between nothing happens so we invented this from the high speed it allows us to go about 10 knots and still click the sample so this one we've just deployed this we're going to drag this to the ocean surface for about maybe 100 miles and see what's in it [Music] a second device the slow-speed manta trawl is able to collect even more precise measurements and is equipped with a spinning flow meter that measures how much water passes through the net so we can determine the average amount of plastic in that water so we've got another few hours before the Sun sets we're going to trawl all night long and you'll see the morning we'll take it out and this be the first evidence in about 25 years of the western half of the Pacific Gyre and compared to last year and he's like how often do you pull out plastic when you do these trials on either the high feed or within might Manta trough you know I've been I've been doing this for about six seven years and we pulled up I'd say between four to five hundred trawls only twice has there not been plastic and that was last year in the South Pacific so I'll be surprised there is new plastic here we expect to find some we're not sure how much [Music] the following morning we pulled the trawl up to examine its contents the thing you can't help but notice are these two giant pieces of foam they look a little bit like waffles I'm thinking what do you what what does it remind you of a taco a taco except for these large pieces of foam most of the plastic we found were small fragments we knew plastic does not fully biodegrade and sea water but over time waves and sunlight were combining to break the plastic down into smaller pieces and since it doesn't biodegrade the plastic out here will never go away it will continue to float in the ocean for decades or longer slowly breaking down into smaller and smaller pieces until it is mistaken for food by an animal or washes up on shore somewhere hundreds of kilometers away so these will dry out or rinse them off real quick yeah let them dry the rest will put into a sample jar to save a stay for later analysis that analysis is simply to count the particles weigh them in different size classes look at a type of plastic and that kind of scripted data kind of tells us how big these garbage patches are and what their contents are and gives us a baseline to monitor we weren't even close to the heart of the Garbage Patch but our first trial sample was full of plastic equally disturbing we realized we were only collecting the plastic that floats amazingly 50% of all plastic sinks in seawater so we could only see half the problem [Music] we began to notice that some of the plastic pieces had bite marks on them animals were eating the plastic but this came is no surprise marine life such as whales and turtles are increasingly being found washed up on shore lines full of plastic on the massive seabird colony of Midway in Hawaii not far from the Garbage Patch tens of thousands of seabirds die of starvation every year after eating things like plastic lighters and bottle caps they mistake for an easy meal actually gives them a false sense of Association they feel they're full and they're not but they're full of is a non nutritive material so they dehydrate they lose their muscle mass when they come weekend more susceptible to disease and death there are documented cases of over 660 different species impacted by ingesting plastic and by entanglement with the number of deaths estimated in the millions plastics can absorb all kinds of pollutants so no off our streets oil oil drops are dripping off for cars and adds to millions of gallons annually washing off our streets that's in the ocean mixing around not mixing in water but sticking to plastic so isn't just the plastic itself it's some of the things that absorb onto that that when a fish eats it may desorb into their body as well eventually into your and your body when you eat them I just won rafting voyage years ago drifting about one and a half knots for three months to Hawaii caught a fish named little that trip a little rainbow runner open the stomach decided curiosity and 17 little micro plastic particles popped out and I know they carry pollutants we're eating our own garbage in a way yes through various stages of consumption up the food chain to us we are eating around trash [Music] fish that are killed by ingesting plastic will not likely wash up on shore so it is difficult to tell which species are eating plastic unless you catch one yourself yeah the Trev the first one we caught was probably like a huge Marlin and took the line right off at this time we got a nice water so fresh fish for dinner after flame the wahoo and examining its stomach contents there was no sign of any plastic fragments thankfully this one was safe to eat [Music] as the days passed we became adjusted to life onboard the sea dragon [Music] the living quarters were tight and we kept busy on constantly rotating chips to keep the research going day and night [Music] multitasking was critical and aside from helping with the research and sailing everyone was expected to keep the ship running efficiently probably one of the most important parts of any boat is the washroom which is also known as the head and right here and one of the unique functions of the head is actually the pumping system and the flushing system so for the sake of time I've preheated the oven here and you just all you have to do is open the hatch and get a pump 20 times all right so it's a little bit of work but you know so you get a little sweaty it's a little stinking here we got the Sun beating down on us so one of the things you want to do is take a shower well the lucky thing for all of us here is you already in the shower so just take a seat and take up the sink and start washing [Music] and we're keeping an eye out for any plastic debris we spot in the ocean right now we're seeing small pieces about every 10 minutes but as we get closer to the accumulation zone I think we're gonna start seeing more pieces and more frequent [Music] it looks like laundry detergent bottles of some kind we're not sure quite what it is but it's pretty obvious that there's a lot of life on it and obviously that would interest you as a marine biologist so tell us a little bit about what interests you but marine debris and what you're seeing on this bottle here I study a variety of aspects of it but one of the main ones that I interests me is how plastic debris serves as a raft to transport species around the ocean to either new places or to help expand their populations so there's a whole community of organisms that's adapted to live on floating objects and as we're seeing now with the abundance of plastic there are some new new players in the community so plastic rafts have the ability to cross vast distances so scientists like dr. Carson are trying to determine if these more durable rafts could act as vehicles for introducing invasive species to new continents and across entire oceans [Music] so here we are we've reached the center of the western Pacific Garbage Patch and the first question everyone wants to ask about this problem is where is this giant mound of plastic twice the size of Texas or the size of Texas and the truth is is that it doesn't exist we are seeing a lot of larger pieces of plastic right now we're seeing the most we've seen all trip about every two minutes or either spotting a piece or pulling one up on board but the real story is much scarier than a giant mound of plastic because it's actually become part of the entire marine food chain you don't find bags or bottles but what you do usually find is a bag or a bottle broken down into a thousand pieces it's become part of every drop of sea water that we pull up in the plankton troll's that's where the true story is as our trawl samples had shown us the entire ocean has become the Garbage Patch we originally set out for so you hear about this this mountain or island of trash and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch but people need to know is that if the entire gyre has these micro placer particles and larger larger pieces tangle balls in that the Kingsmill bottle bottle cap washes by but so spread out if you lump it together it is at island it does exist it's just an exploded into you know trillions and micro plastic fragments so we're in Island I mean relatively speaking you could say that would be a better issue you could fix it and go get it and clean it up when when it's a mountain of micro plastic fragments distributed around the world that's impossible to clean up it's much worse with animals that live there the United Nations estimates that there are over 46,000 pieces of plastic floating in every square mile of ocean surface so how could we ever hope to clean up these tiny particles of plastic spread across such a vast area it was a tough reality for us to accept but the accumulation zone still had another problem to reveal to us so we just came across our first fishing net or net ball and these things are really amazing to check out because when these giant fishing nets are left behind by fishing boats after they get broken or too tangled to bring back to port they usually just throw them overboard or what's really interesting is that they've become a floating habitat for all sorts of marine life I got my underwater camera ready to go so we're gonna hop in and see what kind of life is hanging around it so I'm pretty excited a Met Ball is like an island in the middle of an empty ocean all kinds of life make the ball home and find shelter amongst its tangled ropes it was ironic to think that these nets that were once used to kill fish had now become their home but as we peeled apart the countless layers of netting we began to notice consumer items caught up in the nets and even dead fish inside the nets were still catching fish we tried our best to free any that were still alive even though we knew it wouldn't do much good some of these fish or coastal species that would struggle to survive in the harsh open ocean once we freed them [Music] there are hundreds of small bits of plastic stuck in this bolus yes so just as one netball's caught more micro fragments and we have in probably all of our trawl so far 35 different species of marine life were living within the net ball including several types of crabs shrimp worms and fish we had stumbled upon an entire floating ecosystem we have to understand that what we do on land has an impact and maybe 10 years maybe ten thousand miles everything you do makes a difference in the oceans everything [Music] we're about 640 miles south of Japan and we've just pulled in a manta trawl and it's definitely the thickest one full of plastic we found yet we're just looking through this this sample right here it's almost too many pieces of plastic to count we're also seeing a lot of these pre-production pellets also known as nurdles that's sort of the nickname that they've gotten among the marine debris community and these things are what plastic really looks like before it becomes the consumer items that were used to seeing in our daily lives noodles are so small cheap and abundant that countless numbers of them are lost during industrial spills every year and wash out to sea without ever being turned into a useful product the very things that make plastics so desirable its cheapness and durability are the exact same things that make it so dangerous to the ocean we sat down with crew member Michael Brown the owner of a plastic packaging company who is engaging his industry to embrace a policy known as extended producer responsibility that encourages companies to be responsible for the products they produce for their entire lifecycle producers begin to bear some expense for what they put in the marketplace and that and if they're gonna pay the price to dispose of it they'll start to make things that are easier to dispose of and are less dangerous for the environment 80% of what we're seeing is coming from the land only 20% is being generated at sea by commercial shipping and fishing so if we address the problem on land which I believe the plastics industry is well aware of and actually funding some litter efforts those efforts will help as a secondary effort and sort of a hi-tech effort there's a move towards bio plastics and bio derived plastics that I think in the next 50 years will be the solution bio plastics are derived from biomass sources such as corn and other vegetables but the higher cost of these products in comparison to traditional plastics has made it difficult for them to compete we were encouraged though to learn from crew member Valerie Locker about her line of bio plastic products so I have a line of biodegradable rich toys they are their world first by the which toys and they made with bioplastic called PHA and it's the only plastic 35 - very degrade in marine environment so if that little cap gets washed out to sea it will take two to three years for it to biodegrade microbes in the environment will eat the plastic away and it will go back to nature it's different from regular plastic who has you know you know they photo degrade so they never really go away bio plastics have tremendous potential but as we sat down in front of a pile of debris collected during our voyage we wondered what else can be done to slow down the flow of plastic into our oceans can we recycle our way out of this problem there's no way that is that is the biggest myth that's been a been put on the public telling people keep consuming but then recycle your trash to see recycling being touted as this solution is just nonsense it's it's part of it yes it is part but so much more has to happen recycling is part of the solution but not all plastics are recyclable and most plastic that can be recycled is never recovered globally over 300 million tons of new plastic is produced every year and that number is rapidly growing so a much more effective action is to reduce our consumption of plastic products and packaging altogether we need plastics that time disposed alongside the product cement to protect we're over packaging products we have items like coffee stirrers that have a useful lifespan of 60 seconds that lasts for 60 years and just not right this is a problem that's going to require everyone on the planets participation to solve we're all polluters with plastic we've got to get into the minds eye of every individual on the planet that there's a whole world that we're ruining with our persistent plastic waste we finally reached Japan and we're just pulling into yokohama right now which is just west of tokyo we're really excited to finally touch land and get these sea legs off see what it's like to stand on solid ground for the first time in a long long time [Music] there we go [Music] our journey across the Pacific was an incredible experience and going in we definitely had some misconceptions about what the Garbage Patch really was and how huge the problem really is so where do we go from here because it would be impossible to clean up all the plastic in our oceans exactly and the solution starts right here on land and there's a lot we can be doing to stop plastic from reaching the ocean in the first place to start we all need to try and reduce our consumption of single-use disposable plastic we need to improve recovery and recycling rates and we need the plastic industry and businesses to take greater responsibility for the waste they create and the power lies in all of us to make this difference and if we demand these things as consumers we will see the changes we need to help create a healthier ocean and a healthier planet [Music]