Where Has All the Plastic Gone?

Hundreds of kilometers off the coast of southern California lies the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a vast soup of degraded plastic fragments. On the other side of the country, tiny flecks of floating plastic swim in a swath of seemingly pristine Atlantic Ocean at least two-thirds the size of the United States. Oceanographers have quantified trends in one of these "plastic soups" for the first time, and they've come to a surprising conclusion: The amount of plastic has remained steady for 2 decades despite a steep rise in industrial plastic production. That suggests that either people are keeping their trash on land or plastic is going to some unknown destination in the sea. via Where Has All the Plastic Gone? - ScienceNOW.