Nice graphic on the "Plastic Island" floating around the Pacific Ocean. We're gonna need a bigger recycling container...

This is a graphic that shows the floating island of debris in the Pacific Ocean.  It shows its evolution over time.  Below is what The Economist says about it.  Here is the link to the actual study. 

Source:  The Economist

""New data on the amount of plastic washing around the Pacific
MUCH of the plastic swirling around the sea ends up in the North Pacific Gyre, where four great ocean currents meet to create a swirl of water moving clockwise that is twice the size of the United States. Its less polite name is the North Pacific Garbage Patch. A new study led by Miriam Goldstein of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography and published in Biology Letters has quantified the increase in scraps of plastic there between 1972-87 and 1999-2010. The number of small particles of less than 5mm in diameter floating in the areas sampled increased about 100 times (from virtually nothing). This is bad news for almost everything apart from Halobates sericeus, a small insect that now has lots of nice little floating platforms on which to lay its eggs.""