What people often imagine as the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” is not actually a floating island of trash drifting visibly across the ocean. And despite the attention it receives, it is not the only floating garbage patch in the world.
Scientists have identified multiple large-scale marine debris accumulation zones within major ocean gyres — massive, self-contained systems of circulating ocean currents — across the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans that trap floating debris over time.
There are no towering piles of garbage rising from the sea. No single mass solid enough to stand on. No clear edges separating these accumulation zones from the surrounding ocean. Instead, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a vast and constantly moving concentration of marine debris created by the circulating currents of the North Pacific Gyre.
Stretching between Hawaiʻi and California, the gyre functions like a slow-moving spiral, pulling floating debris into rotation and trapping it within its currents rather than allowing it to disperse.
Covering an estimated 1.6 million square kilometers, roughly twice the size of Texas, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch contains trillions of pieces of plastic suspended throughout the water column, from massive, abandoned fishing nets drifting near the surface to microscopic fragments nearly invisible to the human eye.
Most of the debris, by mass, is believed to come from industrial fishing activity across the Pacific. Lost and abandoned fishing nets alone account for nearly half of the plastic mass within the garbage patch.
Other debris originates from countries and coastlines around the Pacific Rim, carried into the ocean through rivers, stormwater systems, shipping activity and everyday human consumption. Plastic bottles, buoys, crates, ropes, packaging and countless other fragments can remain trapped within the gyre for years, sometimes decades, gradually breaking apart under sunlight and wave action but never fully disappearing.
Eventually, many of those currents converge around the Hawaiian Islands.
As the North Pacific Gyre circulates westward, the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands act almost like a comb, intercepting debris drifting across the Pacific. This marine debris regularly washes ashore across Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument, one of the largest protected marine conservation areas on Earth and one of the most culturally significant places in the Hawaiian archipelago.
For Hawaiʻi, the crisis is deeply uneven. Although the islands contribute relatively little to the global volume of marine debris entering the Pacific, Hawaiʻi often bears the burden of cleanup.
The tons of plastic and fishing gear arriving on Hawaiʻi’s shores originate thousands of miles away. Yet local communities, cultural practitioners, scientists, nonprofits and resource managers continue carrying most of the kuleana for removing it from beaches, reefs and remote shorelines across the pae ʻāina.
Beyond Hawaiʻi’s shores, most of the world is oblivious to the Pacific’s plastic crisis.
This year marks the 20th anniversary of Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument. Established in 2006 as the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands Marine National Monument under Presidential Proclamation 8031, the monument was formally given the Hawaiian name Papahānaumokuākea a year later.
In 2010, it was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site for its combined natural and cultural significance – one of the few places in the world recognized for both. In 2025, marine portions of the monument were additionally designated as Papahānaumokuākea National Marine Sanctuary, becoming America’s 18th national marine sanctuary and the largest within the National Marine Sanctuary System.
While the monument and sanctuary now overlap across marine areas of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, the sanctuary designation adds another layer of long-term marine conservation tools, research coordination and public engagement within the National Marine Sanctuary System.
Larger than all U.S. national parks combined, it is home to more than 7,000 marine species, many found nowhere else on Earth. Millions of seabirds nest throughout the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, while endangered Hawaiian monk seals and threatened green sea turtles rely on the region’s reefs and shorelines for survival.
Yet even after two decades of protection, Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument continues bearing the burden of a global marine debris crisis generated far beyond Hawaiʻi’s shores. Carried across the Pacific by ocean currents and trade winds, plastic garbage and abandoned fishing gear relentlessly wash into one of the most remote and protected places on Earth.
Ghost nets snag coral reefs. Plastic fragments collect among seabird nesting grounds. Buoys, crates and ropes accumulate along shorelines after drifting through the Pacific for years. Storms and shifting ocean conditions can rapidly push new waves of debris ashore, even after beaches and reefs have already been cleared.
The cleanup cycle never truly ends.
Much of that work now falls to organizations like the Papahānaumokuākea Marine Debris Project, a Hawaiʻi-based nonprofit leading large-scale marine debris removal efforts throughout Papahānaumokuākea. Since becoming an independent nonprofit in 2019, PMDP crews have removed more than 1.28 million pounds of marine debris from the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands through extended cleanup expeditions across remote reefs, shorelines and atolls.
Crews often spend weeks at sea cutting massive ghost nets from shallow reef systems, disentangling wildlife and manually hauling waterlogged debris from isolated beaches under difficult marine conditions. The work is physically exhausting and often emotionally heavy, especially knowing more debris will continue arriving with the currents.
But for many involved, the work is also deeply personal.
“If you love something, it’s really easy to want to protect it,” PMDP Executive Director James Morioka said.
Morioka said PMDP intentionally tries to approach the work through stewardship and responsibility rather than hopelessness. While marine debris continues accumulating throughout the Pacific, he believes local action, cultural connection and long-term restoration efforts still matter.
The scale of the work is immense.
Cleanup expeditions often require weeks at sea aboard research and support vessels traveling between isolated islands and atolls located hundreds of miles from the main Hawaiian Islands. Divers carefully cut massive ghost nets from coral reefs to avoid causing additional damage to fragile ecosystems already under stress. Crews manually haul tons of debris from beaches under intense sun and difficult marine conditions, dragging waterlogged nets across coral rubble before loading the material onto vessels for transport back to Honolulu.
Some recovered nets are eventually processed through Hawaiʻi’s Nets-to-Energy program on Oʻahu. Other debris is repurposed for education, research and art. Much of the funding supporting the work comes through federal agencies, particularly NOAA, alongside state support, grants and nonprofit partnerships.
But the labor itself often falls to a relatively small network of scientists, cultural practitioners, conservation workers, nonprofit organizations and volunteers who continue returning despite knowing more debris will inevitably arrive again.
And while larger debris can be removed from shorelines and reefs, the damage extends far beyond what is visible.
Plastic itself never truly disappears. Sunlight and constant ocean movement gradually break larger debris into tiny fragments known as microplastics, which continue moving through marine ecosystems long after the original objects have degraded.
Researchers have found microplastics in fish, seabirds, salt, rainwater and even human bloodstreams. Tiny plastic fragments have been discovered everywhere from the deepest parts of the ocean to remote mountaintops.
Within Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument, marine life bears these consequences continuously. Lost or abandoned fishing gear crushes and scours coral reefs as currents drag heavy nets across shallow reef systems. Hawaiian monk seals and green sea turtles become entangled in drifting nets and marine debris. Seabirds mistake floating plastics for food, feeding fragments to their chicks.
But what happens within Papahānaumokuākea does not remain there in isolation.
Ocean currents, migratory species and interconnected marine ecosystems link Papahānaumokuākea to the main Hawaiian Islands in ways that directly affect Hawaiʻi’s nearshore waters, fisheries and long-term food security.
Many species found within the monument travel throughout the Hawaiian archipelago during different stages of life, while healthy reef systems in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands help support broader marine biodiversity across the region.
For island communities, the ocean is not a distant wilderness. It feeds families, supports local fisheries, shapes cultural practice and sustains relationships passed between generations. Fish and marine resources are not simply commodities, but integral parts of daily life throughout Hawaiʻi.
As plastics break down into microplastics, those fragments can move through entire marine food webs. Small organisms consume them, larger fish consume those organisms, and the contamination continues moving upward through the ecosystem.
Researchers continue to study the long-term impacts of microplastics on marine life, fisheries and human health, particularly in island communities that remain deeply connected to the ocean as a source of food, culture and livelihood.
Today, Papahānaumokuākea is jointly managed through a co-management structure involving NOAA, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the State of Hawaiʻi and the Office of Hawaiian Affairs. In 2021, OHA was formally elevated to co-trustee status within the monument, placing Native Hawaiian representation alongside federal and state agencies in overseeing one of the largest marine conservation areas on Earth.
However, Native Hawaiian stewardship within the monument predates federal protections, marine sanctuary designation and monument boundaries entirely. “Papahānaumokuākea is Hawaiian,” former OHA Papahānaumokuākea Program Specialist Brad Kaʻaleleo Wong said. “And it’s not a Hawaiian place unless you have Hawaiians involved.”
Wong spent nearly a decade helping shape OHA’s role within Papahānaumokuākea’s evolving management structure, working alongside the monument’s Cultural Working Group, federal agencies and state partners during a formative period in the monument’s history.
“The Cultural Working Group and community were so instrumental in making sure that level of protection continued,” Wong said.
Their advocacy helped integrate ʻike kūpuna and Native Hawaiian stewardship into the monument’s long-term management framework through initiatives such as Mai Ka Pō Mai, a Native Hawaiian guidance document developed collaboratively between the Papahānaumokuākea Native Hawaiian Cultural Working Group, community members and the monument’s co-trustees.
Rather than separating culture and conservation into separate systems, the framework emphasizes stewardship grounded in Native Hawaiian worldview, reciprocity and kuleana.
“Our Kānaka worldview of Papahānaumokuākea has never changed through the centuries,” Wong said. “These protections are just another layer placed over a relationship and responsibility that already existed long before them.”
For Native Hawaiian cultural practitioner and Papahānaumokuākea Cultural Working Group member Pelika Andrade, the work of protecting Papahānaumokuākea extends far beyond conservation policy or marine debris removal. At its core, she describes the responsibility as one grounded in pilina, memory and cultural continuity.
“Science doesn’t dictate our actions. Our values do,” Andrade said.
While Papahānaumokuākea is internationally recognized for its ecological significance, Andrade emphasizes that it is also an ancestral realm whose meaning cannot be separated from Hawaiian identity, genealogy and spiritual understanding. For many Native Hawaiians, the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands are deeply connected to concepts of creation, Pō (the ancestral realm) and the continuity of life itself.
For Andrade, preserving Papahānaumokuākea also means protecting the knowledge systems and cultural practices that have long sustained relationships between people and the environment.
“Our DNA carries memory,” Andrade said. “What we need to do is remember together.”
She describes stewardship of the environment as an act of remembering. Not remembering in the sense of discovering something entirely new, but reconnecting to knowledge already carried through ancestry, lived experience and relationship to place.
To her, knowledge does not exist only within institutions, management plans or scientific reports. It lives within communities, protocol, moʻolelo and the ways people continue showing up for one another and for the environment. Caring for places like Papahānaumokuākea, she suggests, requires collective care rooted not only in conservation, but in relationship. It is a call to reconnect people to the environment, to one another and to future generations.
That urgency continues growing as younger generations inherit a Pacific increasingly shaped by climate change, biodiversity loss and plastic pollution.
“The garbage patch is not sourced from Hawaiʻi, and a lot of it’s not even sourced from America,” Andrade said. “We could drastically reduce the trash coming out of Hawaiʻi and we would still be burdened with a global problem.”
And while island nations like Hawaiʻi contribute relatively little to the global volume of marine pollution entering the Pacific, they continue finding themselves on the frontlines of its consequences.
Papahānaumokuākea may sit in the middle of the Pacific, but fishing gear lost thousands of miles away eventually washes ashore on its remote atolls. Plastics carried across the Pacific from continental rivers and coastlines become trapped within the same currents moving through the North Pacific Gyre.
Yet for many who care for these islands and the life surrounding them, stewardship is not measured solely by whether the debris stops arriving. It is measured by the willingness to continue restoring shorelines, protecting marine life and teaching younger generations — despite knowing that the work may never fully end: plastics remain trapped within the gyre; nets continue washing ashore; and debris still arrives with the currents.
But so do the cleanup crews that return again and again. The people who choose to care for it and each other anyway.
This article is reprinted with permission from OHA's Ka Wai Ola newspaper: "Below the Surface: A Burden Washed Ashore" by Philamer Felicitas, in its June 2026 issue, Vol. 43 No. 6. Read more at kawaiola.news.
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