(via Mindfully.org)

At Taco Bell on Main Street in Ventura, Calif., you can take out the chalupa of your choice—Baja, Nacho Cheese, or Supreme, with ground beef, chicken, or steak. But it will always come in a small plastic shopping bag. The bags arrive preprinted from a factory in Asia—usually. One brilliant summer morning in 2000, the small private research vessel Alguita discovered a 10-mile-wide flotilla of the disposable sacks, an estimated 6 million of them destined for Taco Bells around the country, bobbing more than 1,000 miles west of the Ventura store. “We were out in the middle of the Pacific, where you would think the ocean would be pristine,” recalls the Alguita’s captain, Charles Moore. “And instead, we get the Exxon Valdez of plastic-bag spills.”

1. 1990 Running shoes spill

2. 2002 Garbage strip

3. 2000 Plastic bag spill

4. Shoes found

5. Eastern Garbage Patch

   At the eye of the gyre, plastic reaches concentrations of a million pieces per square mile.
   Researchers have mapped a giant spill of bags and a mile-long strip of wind-driven garbage.

6. Caught in a gyre

   Some of the plastic drifting in the North Pacific is swept to shore, like the thousands of Nike shoes that washed up in the Pacific Northwest. But much is trapped by calm winds and sluggish water within the North Pacific’s loop of currents.