ERIKSEN: “The plastic out there. It’s not a condensed island of trash. It’s really spread out. And it’s this plastic soup, that is from continent to continent.”

Animals mistakenly eat the smaller pieces of plastic or feed them to their young.

CUMMINS: “Roughly 43 percent of all marine mammals, 86 percent of all sea turtle species and 44 percent of sea bird species have been found with plastics in or around their bodies. Thirty-five percent of the samples of fish that we collected in the north Pacific had plastic in their stomachs.”

5 Gyres Institute and its partners are now studying how plastics enter the ocean’s food supply and their effects on human health.

CUMMINS: “I had a chance to do what’s called a ‘body burden analysis’ on my own blood. We looked into my blood serum to find, do I have the same chemicals that we know stick to plastic. And we found in my blood trace levels of PCBs, DDT, PFCs and higher levels of flame retardants. We don’t know how these chemicals entered my body. As a woman, I know that these chemicals in my body will pass on to the next generation.”

Marcus Eriksen and his partners used 15,000 empty plastic bottles to build a boat they called “JUNKraft.” In 2008, they sailed from California through the North Pacific Gyre.

ERIKSEN: “The North Pacific Gyre…it’s surprising if you go only 1,000 miles off the coast of California, which is 7,000 miles from Japan, you still get a lot of Japanese and Chinese plastic.”