The Great Pacific Garbage Patch covers an area twice the size of Texas or three times the size of France.

FTO is officially three years old on August 16th. Since our launch in 2019, we’ve achieved more impact than we ever thought possible thanks to YOU, the FTO community! Today we’re sharing important impact milestones and fun stats from the last 3 years to help celebrate our anniversary.

And that's a highly conservative estimate, say scientists.

A non-profit organization has scraped more than 40 tons of fishing nets and consumer plastics from a region of the Pacific that's home to a massive debris field known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

Right now, there are 150 million metric tons of plastic in our oceans—and we're releasing an additional 8 million metric tons each year. Plastic pollution exists almost everywhere in the ocean, from the remote seas of the Arctic to the floor of the deep sea. Luckily, we can take small steps in our everyday lives to reduce plastic waste and make a big impact on the environment. Photo credit © Shutterstock / Shane Gross / WWF

This needs to stop. Scientists estimate that there are 5.25 trillion bits of plastic debris in the oceans worldwide — that's more plastic pieces than stars in our galaxy! Awareness is the first step of change.

Clowns and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch

The Ocean Cleanup has been focusing its efforts on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an enormous collection of marine debris in the North Pacific.