Ocean Floor Littered With Recyclables

The ocean floor has a disturbing amount of trash on it—and a disturbing amount of it could have been recycled. Researchers from the California's Monterey Bay Aquarium have pored over a huge amount of video clips of trash discovered along the coast from Canada to California to Hawaii, LiveScience reports. The results: Plastics are the most common kind of trash down there, particularly plastic bags, with metals like soda and food cans coming in second. Glass bottles are common as well.

"Unfortunately for me, I wasn't so surprised. I've seen plenty of trash as I've been annotating video," says one researcher. "The main way to combat this problem is to prevent all this stuff from getting to the ocean to begin with." (More pollution stories.)