A study has found that there are approximately 269 million tonnes of plastic polluting the ocean. Most pieces are smaller than 5 mm and come from clothing or food and drinks packaging. Just 5% of the world's plastic is currently recycled and, with throwaway plastic products on the increase, the amount of plastic ending up in the ocean is predicted to rise steeply, too.

Plastic items ranging in size from bags or fishing lines to small bottles or tiny fragments may be eaten by seals, turtles and fish—and can kill them. Believing the colourful plastic objects to be food, albatross parents feed them to their chicks. Their stomachs get filled with indigestible plastic so they cannot eat real food and starve. Even the tiniest scraps pf plastic are eaten by small fish, which are then eaten by the bigger fish that are caught as food for people to consume.

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A great deal of waste plastic has accumulated in five large regions of the oceans. They have been gathered and trapped by vast, circular ocean currents known as gyres. The "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" is an area in the Pacific Ocean covered with debris, mostly plastics, that is estimated to be (at least) twice the size of Texas. Much of it is made up of minuscule bits of plastic that cannot be seen by the naked eye, called microplastics. The ocean floor, lying several thousands of metres underneath the Garbage Patch, is also likely to be polluted: around 70% of marine debris sinks to the bottom of the ocean.