Japan is a country where homeowners and shopkeepers sweep up in front every morning and garbage collection points are spick-and-span. Schoolchildren are taught to clean their classrooms. Cleanliness is one of Japanese culture's most strongly held values. So, it is maddening, and embarrassing, that an estimated 20 million tons of Japanese waste was washed into the Pacific Ocean following the March tsunami.
Scientists at the University of Hawaii say that the field of debris has spread out across an area roughly 3,200 km long and 1,600 km wide. Trash from Japan is already washing up on the Midway Islands. By spring, it will wash up on Hawaiian beaches, then continue spreading until it reaches the West Coast of the U.S.
After that, the trash will circle in Pacific currents until becoming trapped in the North Pacific Garbage Patch, an area about the size of Texas where garbage gathers through the circling force of the ocean's currents. Once in the Patch, the Japanese waste will mix with other pollutants and slowly dissolve into smaller particles, polymers and chemical sludge. The disintegrated waste particles will then be ingested by any of several hundred aquatic species.