Figure 3.

Distribution of production date labels identified on plastic objects collected from the North Pacific Garbage Patch in 2015³ (n = 50) and in 2019 (this study, n = 39). See Supplementary Table S8 for joint values with identified countries of origin identified for this study. Dots represent relative distribution of global plastic production per decade⁵¹. Note that global production for the years 2016–2019 was estimated by extrapolating the exponential production increase as observed during the years 1980–2015 (see Supplementary Fig. S2, Supplementary Table S11).