Shocking footage shows the world’s largest landfill as cleanup efforts intensify at a mold-ridden site twice the size of Texas

Shocking images show the world’s largest garbage dump, containing 100,000 tons of everything from discarded refrigerators to children’s toys.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch covers 620,000 square kilometers – an area twice the size of Texas – with the majority of the waste coming from China, Japan, Korea and the US.

The marine debris pile was first discovered in 1997 1,250 miles (2,000 kilometers) west of California and has since spread across the ocean, threatening marine life and releasing toxic microplastics into the atmosphere.

Since 2019, the nonprofit Ocean Cleanup has set out to change this through a $189 million project. The goal is to control the artificial float in the next 10 years.

“We’re getting it out of the ocean while we still can,” Matthias Egger, the charity’s head of environmental and social affairs, told DailyMail.com. “What we’re really doing is preventing an ecological time bomb.”

Shocking drone footage has exposed the world’s largest landfill from above – containing 100,000 tonnes of everything from discarded fridges to children’s toys

Egger said Ocean Cleanup was conceived several years ago by diver Boyan Slat, who founded the nonprofit after becoming frustrated by finding “more plastic than fish” in otherwise beautiful Mediterranean waters.

They first started with the largest garbage dump in the world, known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

During the early years, they focused on developing groundbreaking technology that could clear areas the size of a football field every five seconds.

The machine, known as System 3, dubbed “Josh” by its developers, removes foreign objects from the ocean without harming the natural marine life swimming around in the same area.

“The System 3 machine, which is 2.2 kilometers in size, puts all the plastic into something that looks like a large bag,” Egger told DailyMail.com.

When asked how the machine manages to remove trash from the ocean while leaving small fish unharmed, Egger replied, “That’s the challenge.

“When we developed the first version of the machine, we asked fishermen: “If you were to produce the worst possible fishing net, how would you do it?”

The giant mountain of plastic, known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, covers an area of ​​1,680,000 square kilometers, an area twice the size of Texas.

The floating waste pile was first discovered in 1997 1,200 miles west of California and has since spread across the ocean, threatening marine life and releasing toxic microplastics into the atmosphere.

Since 2019, the nonprofit Ocean Cleanup has set out to change this through a $189 million project that aims to combat the man-made ocean monster over the next 10 years.

Egger explained that the system is designed to provide large escape routes for marine animals to swim to the bottom, without losing the plastic that floats to the top.

He added that the device is also programmed to make a sound that scares marine animals, such as dolphins and whales, so they don’t come near.

“Even if an animal gets into the system, there are holes and it can breathe before it finds an escape route,” he said.

Egger added that teams use a “plastic forecast” every day to determine where the “hot spots” are, based on ocean movements and weather conditions.

He said as much as 80 percent of the waste consists of discarded fishing gear from developed countries – mainly China, Korea, Japan and the US.

“We used to think that most of the plastic you find in the ocean comes from land,” Egger told DailyMail.com.

“But what we do see is that most of the plastic that ends up in the ocean from land stays very close to the river and on the beaches.”

“Sometimes you hear in the media that plastic pollution comes from developing countries that don’t have the infrastructure to dispose of things properly,” he added.

“But we’re finding that the bulk of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is made up of artifacts from highly industrialized countries.”

Egger said most of the plastic removed from the ocean can be recycled – and the Ocean Cleanup is working with Korean carmaker Kia, which is using the waste to build electric cars

Matthias Egger, the charity’s head of environmental and social affairs, explained that the system is designed to have large escape routes for marine life to swim to the bottom, without losing plastic that tends to float to the top.

Egger said Ocean Cleanup was created several years ago by diver Boyan Slat, who founded the nonprofit after becoming frustrated by finding “more plastic than fish” in the otherwise beautiful waters of the Mediterranean.

Egger said the “biggest problem” the trash poses in the ocean comes from the fact that it starts to break down into toxic microplastics.

“They’re so small that they go everywhere,” Egger said. “They go into the fish, they go into the air, they go into the water — and they’re very hard to remove.”

‘Much of the oxygen we breathe comes from the ocean. Microplastics in the air also accelerate climate change.’

Egger said most of the plastic removed from the ocean can be recycled – and the Ocean Cleanup is working with Korean carmaker Kia, which is using the waste to build electric cars.

He said the large-scale data collection behind the scenes of future clean-ups could help hold countries accountable for their green pledges by tracking their waste output as they “bid our time” on the climate crisis.

Recently, an international group of scientists discovered a fungus that accumulates in water and eats through waste. This is detailed in a new study published in the journal Science of the total environment.

The fungus was discovered among the whispering layers of other microbes living in the floating plastic pile, and it is only the fourth known marine fungus that can consume plastic waste.