The basic rule is to never trust any apocalyptic story told to you by an environmentalist ...

...case in point, there is no giant island of garbage the size of Texas in the Pacific.

The famous picture of the purported garbage patch is actually from Manila harbor.

Io9 reports:

MYTH: There is a giant island of solid garbage floating in the Pacific.
FACT: There are millions of small and microscopic pieces of plastic, about .4 pieces per cubic meter, floating over a roughly 2736 square km area of the Pacific. This amount has increased significantly over the past 40 years.

In reality, Goldstein said, most pieces of garbage in the Pacific are "about the size of your pinkie fingernail." Though she and her team have found some larger pieces of plastic, like buoys and tires, most are microscopic. What's alarming about them isn't their size, but the sheer amount of plastic. To figure out how much there really is, she and her team have trawled the surface of the ocean in random locations over a 2736 square km region in the gyre. Once a day, they drag a very fine, specialized net behind the boat. On one such sampling trip, she and her team found plastic pieces in 117 out of 119 random samples. On another, they found plastic in all 28 samples they took.

The fact that there is a lot of really small bits of plastic floating in the Pacific is probably not a good thing. It needs to be studied.

But that isn't the same thing as