Some facts about ocean pollution

Indonesia, India top the trash tally

More plastic in the ocean comes from Indonesia and India than anywhere else together, they contribute more plastic to the world's coastal environments than the next seven countries combined, including the United States, which ranks third on the list

More plastic than fish

Up to 12 million metric tons: That’s how much plastic we dump into the oceans each year. That’s about 26 billion pounds — or the equivalent of more than 100,000 blue whales — every single year. By 2050, ocean plastic will outweigh all of the ocean’s fish

5 garbage patches

There’s so much junk at sea, the debris has formed giant garbage patches. There are five of them around the world, and the largest — the Great Pacific Garbage Patch — includes an estimated 1.8 trillion pieces of trash and covers an area twice the size of Texas.

Pollution is in fashion (literally)

With each load of laundry, more than 700,000 synthetic microfibers can be washed into our waterways. Unlike natural materials such as cotton or wool, these plasticized fibers do not break down. One estimate puts the number of plastic microfibers in the ocean at 4 billion per square kilometer.

Even nutrients can become harmful

When dumped at sea in large amounts, agricultural nutrients such as nitrogen can stimulate the explosive growth of algae. When the algae decompose, oxygen in the surrounding waters is consumed, creating a vast dead zone that can result in mass die-offs of fish and other marine life.

The number of dead zones is growing

In 2004, scientists counted 146 hypoxic zones (areas of such low oxygen concentration that animal life suffocates and dies) in the world’s oceans. By 2008, that number jumped to more than 400. In 2017, in the Gulf of Mexico, oceanographers detected a dead zone nearly the size of New Jersey — the largest dead zone ever measured at the time.

Oil spills aren’t the big(gest) problem

Headline-grabbing oil spills account for just 12 percent of the oil in our oceans. Two to three times as much oil is carried out to sea via runoff from our roads, rivers and drainpipes.