Oceans fill with plastic—and it's hard to remove

Imagine walking along a beach ... and picking up a handful of littered plastic bags every step. Dystopian it may seem, but it's a pretty clear image of how much garbage is falling into the oceans every year, according to new research.

Somewhere between roughly 5 million and 13 million metric tons of plastic trash are drifting into the sea annually—enough plastic to make five grocery bags for every foot of coastline on Earth, researchers said in a study published Thursday in the journal Science.

Oceans fill with plastic—and it's hard to remove