In the summer of 1997, Charles Moore set sail from Honolulu for California after competing in a trans-Pacific race. When he and his crew took a shortcut through the seldom-traversed North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, a vast oceanic "desert" where winds are slack, Moore realized his ship was skimming through a plastic soup. He had stumbled upon the largest garbage dump on the planet, soon to be dubbed the Great Pacific Garbage Patch--where plastic outweighs...