Every year, the average American goes through more than 250 pounds of plastic waste, and much of that comes from packaging. So what do we do with it all? Your recycling bin is part of the solution, but many of us are confused about what we should be putting in there. What's recyclable in one community could be trash in another.

Natural disasters such as hurricanes, tropical storms, tsunamis, and landslides have the potential to generate a tremendous amount of marine debris. The high winds, heavy rains, storm surge, and flooding associated with these disasters can pull large structures, household articles, and outdoor items into surrounding waters.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a collection of marine debris in the North Pacific Ocean. Marine debris is litter that ends up in oceans, seas, and other large bodies of water. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, also known as the Pacific trash vortex, spans waters from the West Coast of North America to Japan. The patch is actually comprised of the Western Garbage Patch, located near Japan, and the Eastern Garbage Patch, located between the U.S. states of Hawaii and California.

Debris Tracker is designed to help citizen scientists like you make a difference by contributing data on plastic pollution in your community. We've been tracking litter since before smartphones existed, and we're still driven by uniting technology and citizen science to fight plastic pollution. Every day, dedicated educational, non-profit, and scientific organizations and passionate citizen scientists from all around the world record data on inland and marine debris with our easy-to-use app, contributing to our open data platform and scientific research.

The #breakfreefromplastic Movement is a global movement envisioning a future free from plastic pollution. Since its launch in 2016, more than 8,000 organizations and individual supporters from across the world have joined the movement to demand massive reductions in single-use plastics and to push for lasting solutions to the plastic pollution crisis.

Break Free From Plastic is taking litter cleanups a step further by documenting the brands found on plastic waste collected at a cleanup. This helps us identify the companies responsible for plastic pollution. To truly solve the plastic problem, we are calling on these companies to stop producing so much unnecessary single-use plastic in the first place.

Teaching environmental issues in your classroom is a critical component of providing your students a Meaningful Watershed Educational Experience (MWEE). Discover a wealth of environment-related books, multimedia, curriculum guides, individual lesson plans and online data sources

Drawing on decades of experience in marine and coastal pollution research, Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) undertook a collaborative project with Ocean Conservancy (OC) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Marine Debris Program (NOAA MDP) to better understand marine debris within the United States.

Despite its prevalence, marine debris is a problem that each individual citizen can help prevent. Education is the first crucial step in mitigation. Through the use of this guide, we can help foster environmental stewardship and create advocates for the marine environment. With every person that participates in a cleanup, uses a reusable bag or water bottle, or spreads the word about marine debris, we move one step closer to creating a more beautiful and healthy marine environment.

Accumulation studies provide information on the rate of deposition (flux) of debris onto the shoreline. These studies are more suited to areas that have beach cleanups, as debris is removed from the entire length of shoreline during each site visit. This type of survey is more labor-intensive and is used to determine the rate of debris deposition (# of items per unit area, per unit time).