To figure out how much refuse is floating in those garbage patches, four ships of the Malaspina
expedition, a global
research project studying the oceans, fished for plastic across all five major ocean
gyres in 2010 and 2011.
The 5
Gyres Institute, a leading
research organization focusing on plastic pollution in the world's oceans, recently discovered microbeads on a
research expedition in the Great Lakes, where they found as many as 466,000 microplastics per square kilometer.