recent years this blanket has come under threat mostly from plastic pollution some thirteen million tons of plastic are washed into the sea every year. five gigantic marine plastic garbage islands float around the world's ocean currents. the great pacific garbage patch drifts between hawaii and california it's four times larger than germany. happily the floating quagmire could get something of a purge this summer. the ocean cleanup is the brainchild of churchmen boy and slant it's a boom which drifts more slowly than the plastic which collects along behind it to be recovered for recycling the clean up system will automatically gravitate to those places where most plastic it's that now causes the efficiency to be a lot higher because there's just more plastic in front of the system and therefore we can now clean up fifty percent of that that in just five years ago. collected