Ever heard of the term “plastic soup”? Maybe you’re imagining melted down plastics, some clear, some bright red or dark blue, all mixed together to make up the broth. There are tiny colorful plastic balls called micro beads mixed in–that can act as your noodles, the kind you see in Italian Wedding Soup. With all its vibrant color, you might think this unusual concoction would be sickly sweet, like bright, liquid candy. But instead of being sickly sweet, it’s just…sickly. You may want to give this back to your waiter and order something else. I recommend the lobster roll.

Still, “plastic soup” does exist, but not in the context that I just described. Giant, floating masses of inorganic material, plastic, micro beads, micro fiber…these are the things that make up much of the debris coursing through our oceans today, collecting en masse to form moving surfaces of improperly disposed trash that doesn’t break down fast enough, or can barely biodegrade at all.

The pie chart you see above is displaying all the different types of pollution that gets left in ocean, either purposefully or by mistake. As you can see from the pie chart, 35% of all of it is from synthetic textiles. According to one article which surmises a report published by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN),

“…an average 3.2 million tons out of 9.5 million tons of plastic which enters the oceans every year consists of primary microplastics. These are small particles which do not come from the fragmentation of larger pieces of plastic. More than half of these (58%) are made up of tyre particles and fibers from clothing.”

More than half come from fibers from clothing. What’s more, according to Green Peace, “polyester is now used in about 60% of our clothes”, so it’s even harder to try and cut down on our use of plastic unless we voice our opinion. The reason why so much plastic has been mending into our clothing is because it’s dirt cheap. Making polyester clothing is so much easier and cheaper than growing cotton. You don’t have to worry about the farmer, or the crops dying, or the pesticides or herbicides, which is a plus, but unfortunately, the stakes are still too high.

Still, seeing is believing. Perhaps it’s only a matter of time that, if we don’t curb these waves of microplastics getting into the ocean and harming wildlife, we’ll find these microplastics in the animals we encounter in our lives, whether we are caring for them, consuming them, or just looking at them with their corpses filled to the brim with colorful little beads of plastic.