Tons of debris known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch has drawn increasing attention in the past year, and the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration has announced a broad plan to assess and remove the trash. The effort, the first of its kind, and focusing on waters near the Hawaiian Islands, eventually should determine the best method of countering garbage gyres wherever they exist in the world's seas.

Ship captain Charles Moore is known to have come across the Pacific garbage patch northeast of Hawaii more than a dozen years ago on his way from a sailing race in the islands. The swirling patch contains pieces of glass, bottle caps, toothbrushes and plastic, combined with about 1.3 million pounds of fishing nets abandoned from Hawaii's shores and other islands.

NOAA has worked with state, county and private sector partners to develop the plan to cut back on the trash, which can suffocate reefs and strangle ocean-dwelling marine life. The administration's Marine Debris Program supported a statewide planning workshop in Honolulu two years ago, bringing together various organizations and businesses to address the problem.

A 2006 United Nations report estimated that every square mile of ocean contains 50,000 pieces of litter, much of it harmful but not visible to the naked eye. Much of it is believed to have originated in California and Japan and now whirls in an area twice the size of Texas.

Environmental activists and companies came together last summer in a mission, called Project Kaisei, to recover the garbage from the whirlpool and turn a profit through recycling, including turning plastic into diesel fuel. That will be a daunting challenge while researchers still are expanding their basic knowledge of the huge trash bin.

At this point, NOAA has doubts that 80 percent of marine debris comes from land and 20 percent from the ocean, a statement frequently made in the press. Nor is the agency able to estimate the concentration of litter, including plastic, in a given area.

The estimate that 100,000 marine mammals and/or sea turtles die each year from marine debris “;is possible, but difficult to say with certainty,”; NOAA says. Similar questions continue unanswered about other consequences.

Many scientists believe garbage patches also whirl off the coast of Japan and in the Sargasso Sea, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, although with lesser concentrations of trash.

The garbage patches undoubtedly threaten the ocean environment and a concerted effort has been needed to address the problem. Fortunately, NOAA has designated Hawaii's waters to be the nexus of such crucial research and response.