Garbage Island | Video by Vice

If you’ve wondered why there’s such a push to get rid of supermarket plastic bags, here’s your answer.

Across the world’s oceans exist five gyres — huge systems of circulating currents that work like a vortex, sucking everything to their centre. The sucking happens pretty slowly (so it’s not particularly scary) but over time their existence means that any crap that ends up in the ocean is likely to eventually be sucked into the middle of one of them.

One gyre, the North Pacific Gyre, is particularly large. Documentary makers from Vice had heard horror stories of islands of plastic waste that had accumulated in the middle of the gyre, so they went to investigate. If the end result doesn’t get people using less plastic, I don’t know what will.