Catalina Island, located 22 miles off the coast of Los Angeles, once collected Hollywood royalty, smugglers and silver miners. Now, it collects trash. Its windward-facing harbor is a collection point of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an enormous spread of microplastics with accumulated larger debris that stretches more 1.6 million square kilometers. It is stark evidence of the impact of ever-increasing production of plastics globally, which is estimated to reach a volume of 1.1 billion tons annually by 2040.
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Source: Phys.org