Weve all heard that the plastic bag island is supposedly larger than the state of Texas.

But actually, there is no real island of plastic to set up lawn chairs and beach towels. The proper name is the Central Pacific Gyre (East). It spans from the California coast to Japan or approximately 10 million square miles in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

The Gyre has extremely strong and circular currents and winds which cause it to lock in anything that enters its space. The Algalita Marine Research Foundation in Long Beach, CA, says that even yachts should avoid traveling into the Gyre. The Gyre is also known as plastic soup as it has accumulated so many plastic bags recently.

The founder and research director of the Algalita Foundation, Captain Charles Moore, says that the Gyre is not even the worst “trash island.” The Algalita Foundation, which exists to bring to light marine ecological issues, recently went to the Gyre and discovered an even more troubling “plastic bag island” — the subtropical convergence zone (West). The subtropic convergence zone is the area of the ocean where tropical currents meet colder, arctic ones. This convergence of currents has caused an even larger and more dense trash collection.

More informally these regions are called the East and West Pacific Garbage Patch. Debris floating around the garbage patches consists mainly of fishing gear and plastic waste.

Fishing gear and plastic waste are commonly mistaken for food. Studies have shown turtles and other marine wildlife have been found dead with plastic bottles and other debris in their bodies. Think about it, plastic bags sit in the ocean for years and eventually break down into tiny particles which reach even the smallest species of marine life, say shrimp. When was the last time you ate shrimp, you might as well have been eating plastic.

I don’t know if people realize this but the ocean is not a trash dump! How much effort does it take to recycle plastic bags or plastic bottles? While more and more Americans are recycling plastic bags there are still more than 90 billion bags each year that are not recycled worldwide.

There has to be a solution to the amount of waste that we generate, and that solution is to transition from plastic bags to reusable bags.