You’ve heard of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the island of mostly plastics that’s grown to three times the size of France. 

But new research published in the journal Marine Policy shows that humanity’s garbage isn’t just floating on the ocean surface where there might be some hope of cleaning it up. Video footage has captured images of garbage — single-use plastics bags, to be specific — on the bottom of the earth’s deepest ocean trench more than 10 kilometres below the surface.

The study authors used images and video compiled into the Deep-sea Debris Database, which was made available for public use a year ago by the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC). Collected since 1983, the images were gathered by deep-sea submersibles and remotely