The Great Pacific Island Garbage Patch.
This has been a pet issue of mine, something I find fascinating, and I wanted to save my last entry for it. This is that garbage island the size of Texas you might've heard of before. Technically, it's a gyre of ocean currents, rotating currents that is, but these currents have collected a lot of solid waste that made its way into the ocean one way or another. Technically, chemical sludge may or may not be considered "solid," but there's also plastics and other debris.
The very slow photodegradation of plastic has a very nasty effect on the wildlife, along with the rest of the chemical sludge and such of course. Not matter how much the plastic degrades, the basic structure still remains a polymer, meaning the plastic lasts for a very long time on a microscopic level and is always around to damage wildlife who accidentally ingest it.
For more information, here's a link to the site of the NOAA, the group who originally discovered the patch in 1988.
http://marinedebris.noaa.gov/info/patch.html

Madeline Wierzal