Wrappers, fishing gear, bottles, bags. Trillions of plastic items enter our oceans each year, washing up on beaches and wreaking havoc on marine ecosystems. For more than 60 years, researchers in the U.K. have been collecting data on pollution in the North Atlantic. In a recent article, the team confirmed that the ocean is now littered with three times more plastic than it was in the 1960s. The information they gathered will help guide conservation and waste management efforts going forward.