Angela - Garbage Patches

April 2012 I saw my very first television clip on the Great Pacific garbage patch, ocean plastic, and the resulting debris that ends up on Hawaii's beaches. Hawaii, the most beautiful place I've had the opportunity to visit, unbelievably also has one of the world's dirtiest beaches as you can see in the video below (not the one I saw in April):

"5 Major Gyres", Image Source: Wikipedia

To my dismay I've come to learn that there isn't just one garbage patch, but because plastic gets trapped in gyres which are vortexes created by currents, there are several patches of plastic debris floating in our oceans.  The only "benefit" to this discovery is that I don't have to wait until I move to the West coast to study ocean plastic, but through this project have had the opportunity to initiate my research on our Florida beaches.  

So far, while researching whether Florida's east or west coast has more (if any) plastic, I've completed my east coast investigation and luckily have not come across a beach as littered as Kamilo Beach featured in the above video clip; however, I've found more plastic than I had expected and watching plastic being deposited with each wave hitting Pompano Beach was especially gut churning. Is one organized beach cleanup per year enough preventative treatment, or will our beaches slowly develop giant plastic tumors?