Vice TV’s Toxic–Garbage Island, an hour long documentary broken into twelve short parts, takes us aboard the ORV Alguita on a three-week round trip to the Northern Gyre in the Pacific Ocean, a spot where currents spin and cycle, churning up tons of plastic into a giant pool of chemical soup, flecked with bits and whole chunks of refuse that cannot biodegrade.

Led by Captain Charles Moore, Thomas Morton, and two other Vice TV alums, producer Meredith Danluck and camerman Jake Burghart, join a doctor and a scientist to search for “garbage island,” a floating man-made disaster twice the size of Texas. Instead of the “money shot” of a huge drifting pile of plastic, what they find is far more horrifying: thousands of microplastics per liter of water, at a ratio of 60:1 plastic pieces to sea organisms, suffocating the ocean and breaking down into polymers as they draw persistent organic pollutants like PCB and DDT into their structures.

And yes, fish and other sea life eat those pieces of plastic.

As Thomas points out:

We have consigned ourselves to eating our own sh*t

Says Moore sadly as they sail the toxic waters:

It’s the composition of the ocean now.

And how do we escape it? How do we as a planet stop using plastics? While maybe 50% of plastic bottles are recycled, there is no plan in place to recycle bottle caps. And then there’s bisphenol A, an ingredient in may plastic items which does not recycle.

Seeing this changes people’s perception of how things are,

says Moore, and that’s what Vice TV does in this documentary. You will never look at the ocean–or a piece of plastic–in the same way.

But despite the grim and sobering theme, there are moments of fun and wonder along with cabin fever: Whales, dolphins, sunsets and moonrises show the glory of nature before the crew enters the gyre. But ultimately we are left with Thomas Morton’s final summary:

If we’ve ruined the ocean what chance do we have with land, or with ourselves for that matter?