Great Pacific garbage patch

And, um, I'm from Tinley Park, Illinois.

Um, my favorite episode is The Great Pacific Garbage Patch because it inspired me to look after my planet.

Thank you.

Goodbye.

Well, I mean, I'm not going to be the first human who's going to try one.

But yes, they said they used some yeast to turn plastic waste into protein-rich cookies with the idea that then this could become like some magical future food if they're like, I don't know, needing to like take cookies to the... colony on mars or something they turned plastic into fucking cookies for people to eat i'm just saying that the uh the great pacific garbage patch um could be our next agricultural all right well

that does it for us today tuesday september 15th 2026 ashley who do we have to thank for this episode of the podcast

a shout out to david and tyler walker thank you both so much for sponsoring this episode of our show at patreon.com slash morning somewhere and

Read a book about it." And I know that that's hard as hell.

I know that's gonna be so hard, but if you just look at the carousels of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, you're gonna be miserable.

But if you read a Hannah Ritchie book, you're gonna be powerful.

And, like, [laughs] that's it.

That was our second most common type of debris.

But abandoned, lost, otherwise discarded fishing gear, line, netting was the top, and that seems to be really abundant here in Hawaii, maybe because of our proximity to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

We're on the edge of the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre.

But this study really highlights that type of marine debris as a problem here.

But it eventually turned into like a $40 million investment.

And essentially his goal was to clean up the Pacific Garbage Patch, right? The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which is, as they said, the size of Texas.

It has all this garbage in it.

It's basically like a gyre system, you know, in the Pacific.

Ocean gyres accumulate microplastics in concentrated patches that function like slow-moving islands of plastic debris.

The world's major ocean gyres, particularly the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, represent regions where circular ocean currents trap floating debris in relatively concentrated zones.

Microplastics accumulate in these gyres at densities far exceeding typical ocean concentrations.

Once microplastics enter a gyre system, they can remain trapped for extended periods, continuing to fragment and break apart while remaining in the same general region.

That's 620,000 square miles.

This is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which is about the size of Texas, as I just said.

Unbelievable.

That's amazing.