Vice sails out to the North Pacific Gyre, the swirling current system that collects plastic waste from across the ocean into what has become known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The crew treats the patch less as a solid island and more as a diffuse soup of degraded plastic fragments, and the film follows scientists and activists who have spent years trying to measure exactly how large it is and what it is doing to marine life. Interviews on board and on land lay out the scale of the problem: fish and seabirds ingesting plastic pellets, currents carrying debris thousands of miles from its source, and the near impossibility of ever physically removing it. The crew's own voyage into open water, hauling up samples and sorting through the debris by hand, gives the abstract statistics a physical form. The film stays close to what the researchers actually pull out of the water rather than dramatizing the subject, and treats the gyre as a slow-motion disaster still being measured.