Explain where and how plastic accumulates in the open ocean.

Plastic accumulates in the open ocean specifically in gyres. The North Pacific subtropical
gyre covers a large area of the Pacific in which the water circulates clockwise in a slow
spiral. Winds there are light. The currents tend to move any floating material into the lowenergy
center of the gyre. There are few islands on which the floating material can beach, so
it stays in the gyre. This area, about the size of Texas, has been dubbed the Asian Trash
Trail or the Eastern Pacific Garbage Patch. A smaller western Pacific equivalent has
formed midway between San Francisco and Hawaii and another lies off the east coast of the
United States. It has been estimated that the weight of the debris trapped in gyres to be about
3 million metric tons.