The journal PLoS ONE has published a paper that sets out to quantify the amount of plastic pollution that exists in the world’s seas and oceans. The report is based on 24 worldwide expeditions undertaken between 2007 and 2013 which used surface netting and visual methods to quantify the extent of the pollution. The researchers came up with a statistic that suggests that there are more than 5 trillion plastic particles, weighing over 268,940 tons, floating at sea.