In the vast waters between Hawaii and San Francisco drifts a massive heap of debris dubbed, rather fittingly, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. It covers an area larger than Texas, according to marine biologists, and is filled with—yes, garbage.

Astounding quantities of trash—an estimated six kilos of plastic for every kilo of naturally occurring plankton—have been accumulating for decades in the North Pacific sub-tropical gyre, where natural currents spiral clockwise and gather any floating material into its low energy center. Most of the debris is plastic, prized among consumers for its durability and hazardous among ocean-dwellers for the same reason.

Since the invention of plastic in the 1960s, its prevalence in common goods has grown exponentially. One hundred million tons of plastic are produced each year worldwide; 10 percent of that ends up in the ocean, where it kills over one million seabirds and 100,000 marine animals yearly by ingestion or entanglement.

In addition, most of these plastics act as sponges for toxic chemicals that don’t dissolve well in water, such as DDT and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). Some pellets—small beads of plastic that are sold in bulk quantities as raw material for making other products—have concentrations of these chemicals one million times greater than the levels found in adjacent seawater. These “poison pills,” as the LA Times calls them, look like fish eggs and often end up in the stomachs of birds, sea turtles, and other marine animals.

On Midway Atoll, a small island between Japan and North America, 40 percent of albatross chicks die each year, their bellies full of garbage. Albatross parents comb nearby waters for food, mistaking brightly colored plastics for fish.

Little is being done to clean up the garbage or prevent it from getting dumped in the first place. Most of the action stems from bands of “citizen pollution patrols” in the National Marine Debris Monitoring Program, who sponsor clean-ups along the North American coastline and sort through collected trash in an effort to better understand where it comes from. The United Nations and grassroots organizations such as Greenpeace are also starting to tackle fishing waste management and plastic trawling.

And through it all, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch floats on.