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The status and fate of oceanic garbage patches

Nature Reviews Earth & Environment volume 3, pages 730–732 (2022)Cite this article

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Floating plastic is accumulating in the five subtropical oceanic gyres, but little is known about their composition, sources, and fate. Monitoring has provided insight into persistence and accumulation processes in the North Pacific Ocean, but their relevance in other gyres is unknown. Identifying the sources of plastics, in all subtropical gyres, is necessary for cleanup efforts to be effective.

Most plastic introduced to the ocean will sink or float back to land. However, buoyant debris can become entrapped and circulate for years in subtropical oceanic gyres, slowly accumulating; resultingly, floating plastic waste totals on the order of 105 tons at the ocean surface1. Although the occurrence of plastic accumulation in gyres is well-established, the long-term fate of these oceanic garbage patches is unclear. Here, I describe a brief history of discovery, monitoring and the challenges to quantify the scale of the problem.

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Fig. 1: Observing the oceanic garbage patches.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The Ocean Cleanup, Rotterdam, Netherlands

    Laurent Lebreton

  2. The Modelling House, Raglan, New Zealand

    Laurent Lebreton

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  1. Laurent Lebreton
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Correspondence to Laurent Lebreton.

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Competing interests

The author is consulting for The Ocean Cleanup, a not-for-profit organization developing technology to remove floating plastics from the ocean’s surface.

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Lebreton, L. The status and fate of oceanic garbage patches. Nat Rev Earth Environ 3, 730–732 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43017-022-00363-z

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