These five nations leave a particularly large amount of garbage in the sea

Most of the flotsam in the North Pacific garbage patch can be traced back to five major fishing nations. Most of the plastic comes from Japanese, Chinese, South Korean, US and Taiwanese sources, write researchers in the journal Scientific Reports. Tens of thousands of tons of plastic waste are currently floating in the North Pacific garbage patch. A large part of it consists of fishing nets, ropes and hard plastic parts.

Millions of tons of plastic end up in the oceans every year. Sometimes rivers wash the garbage from the land into the seas, sometimes the plastic ends up directly in the oceans. While the majority of plastic waste is believed to accumulate mainly on coasts or the seabed, a smaller portion of plastic waste is swept together by ocean currents and accumulates in so-called garbage vortices.

300,000 tons of waste are disposed of in nature every year throughout Germany. Parks and lakes are mainly littered with cigarette butts, lids and food packaging. This not only looks ugly, but is also dangerous.

Source: WELT/ Viktoria Schulte

Experts assume there are five large such garbage patches. One of them is the North Pacific Garbage Patch: it symbolizes the impact of the widespread use of plastic and its disposal in the world's oceans. But where does the plastic that's floating around in the North Pacific garbage patch come from?

It is widely believed that most plastic waste comes from the countryside. However, the contribution of oceanic debris sources is increasing. For example, it is estimated that fishing – in the form of fishing nets and other fishing gear abandoned at sea – contributes half a million tons of marine litter every year. However, this estimate is outdated and has not been updated since the 1970s.

In offshore areas like the North Pacific Garbage Patch, the provenance and origin of the waste is often unknown because only small fragments of plastic have been examined to date. Previous expeditions have been able to determine the rough composition of the flotsam: fishing nets, ropes and other hard plastic parts make up up to three quarters of the accumulated floating plastic mass in the region. While the exact country of origin of fishing nets is difficult to trace, hard plastic objects over two inches in size often provide clues as to their geographic origin.

As part of a campaign by the Dutch non-profit organization "The Ocean Cleanup", Laurent Lebreton's research team collected more than 6,000 pieces of hard plastic (547 kilograms in total) from the North Pacific garbage patch. The fragments were sorted and analyzed for their origin. Fishing nets and fishing gear for aquaculture made up 26 percent of all analyzed finds.

Plastic floats and buoys, bottle caps and household items such as containers, cans and baskets could also be identified. However, a third of the rubbish could not be assigned to a clear category.

The research team discovered writing in a specific language on more than 200 pieces of plastic. Chinese and Japanese were the most common languages, followed by English and Korean. With a total of 232 plastic parts, the origin could be proven based on language, text, company name or logo. The origin of other finds could not be determined, for example because the company identified on them produces internationally.

Finally, the researchers identified the five countries of origin with the largest amounts of plastic in the North Pacific garbage patch: Japan, China, Korea, the USA and Taiwan. Around a third of the waste examined came from Japan and China. The research team's findings confirm previous studies from 2015.

The scientists used a computer model to understand how and where the plastic parts got into the sea. They found that the majority of the hard plastic parts had a high probability of not having got into the sea via rivers or coastal towns, but directly into the sea through fishing activities. Both China, Japan, South Korea, the USA and Taiwan are industrialized fishing nations in the North Pacific. They accounted for 87 percent of the simulated fishing activities contributing to the North Pacific garbage patch in the study.