North Pacific Gyre's Plastic Plague

You've probably seen footage of those huge landfills where mountains of trash are pushed around by large bulldozers. Flocks of birds hang around to pick up a meal of yesterday's unfinished Big Mac or a couple of your fries.

Now imagine the landfill in the middle of the Pacific. It's twice the size of Texas. There are no dozers, and the trash isn't as concentrated. Chances are pretty good that a water bottle or a grocery bag discarded near the ocean will end up here. The currents in the ocean carry the waste around the Pacific and deposit the junk in the relatively calm currents of the Gyre.

The birds are there, and they mistake bottle-caps, toothpaste tube caps, and other plastic fragments for food. They die. So do the whales that get tangled up in plastic twine, rope, and discarded fishing nets.

http://www.oceans.greenpeace.org/en/our-oceans/pollution/trash-vortex

Google "North Pacific Gyre" and do your own research. One observer noted that there were six times as much microscopic plastic material as there were zooplankton in the water.

This is your world.