Jaymi Heimbuch over at treehugger posted a little bit about her experience at Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge where over 2 million seabirds live and the effects of the Pacific Garbage Patch are evident. The atoll might be remote but our plastic trash is still managing to ride the waves out to a part of the world most of us will never visit.

Heimbuch wanted to see firsthand what she had only seen on the Internet -the sad photographs of decomposing birds with the contents of their stomachs exposed.  Shards of plastic and even more identifiable objects like lighters, bottle caps, toothbrushes and fishing wire have all been found in birds that wash up on the island’s shore or die on the island.  That's why the Midway bird images are a poignant teaching tool: almost everyone that looks at the image can see something they have once used.

During Heimbuch’s visit she didn’t see one of these birds and she tells us why: “There are a couple possibilities. Rumor has it some visiting photographers are moving carcasses so that no one else can get these shots. Another possibility, though less likely, is that last year's tsunami washed away many older carcasses that would have decayed enough to show the plastics inside.”

Even though she didn’t see it with her own eyes Heimbuch never stopped believing there was a plastics problem.

A group of biologists have published a comparative study and a standardized method to estimate the unseen “microplastic particles” that are also present in the ocean but are harder to count than pen caps and bottles. Their research appears in the Environmental Science & Technology journal.

"Microplastic Particles" are pieces of plastic whose diameter is less than five millimeters that means smaller than a bedbug. These teeny-tiny bits are just as dangerous as their larger counterparts because they can collect toxic substances as they float and possibly enter the food chain.

"Microplastic particles are swallowed by organisms and absorbed via the digestive tract. It has been possible, for example, to detect them in the tissue of mussels or other animals," says Dr. Lars Gutow, biologist at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in the Helmholtz Association.

Gutow and his team studied 68 scientific publications to try and ascertain how bad the microplastic pollution is in the ocean. They found that they couldn’t even begin to make an estimate because the methods used to collect data varied greatly. They scrapped their plan to quantify the microplastics and focused on creating guidelines “for the recording and characterisation of microplastic particles”.  

They hope their methods and suggestions will be used in future studies of microplastics so reliable, consistent data can be presented to the public as we try to fix our plastics problem.