Household appliances and other debris picked by tsunami waves and carried off to open seas during the massive quake that hit northeast Japan on March last year could soon reach U.S. territories this year and next year.

The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reported on Tuesday that refrigerators and television sets swept away by giant tsunami waves from Japan could appear near Hawaii by winter this year.

Other debris could also hit the shorelines of American West Coast by 2013, NOAA officials said, with the agency identifying Alaska, Oregon and Washington as the likely destinations of the wrecked materials, reminding the world of the devastation that Japan had endured when the magnitude-9 earthquake struck the nation.

The Japanese government had estimated that more than 15,000 people were killed with scores listed as missing when the tsunami waves triggered by the epic quake reached the country's northeast coastlines and inundated many communities a few kilometres far into inland.

Ruth Yender of NOAA told the Associated Press that monitoring teams have been formed to look for the debris in Midway and other atolls dotting the Pacific Ocean.

Environmentalists have largely ruled out that the debris were contaminated by radiation but added that they pose some form of danger to marine creatures, specifically to monk seals that thrive in Hawaii.

According to Nicholas Mallos of the Ocean Conservancy, many of the debris were supposed to have been peeled off from a number of fishing villages in Japan, meaning fishing gears could damage coral reefs or trap and hurt marine animals the moment they wash ashore.

Experts said much of the estimated two million tonnes of debris carried off by the tsunami waves to the open seas may have either been dispersed or sunk months after the initial mass of garbage that they created in the immediate aftermath of the quake.

"But the major question is how much of that material has sank since last year, and how much of that remains afloat or still in the water column," Mallos told AP.

Last year, a Russian ship reported of debris sightings near west of Hawaii but ocean current experts suggested that by this time the chunks of garbage floating since the March disaster probably drifted apart, with only a fraction of them reaching the North American coastlines.

NOAA officials told AP that some 25 million tonnes of garbage were created by the Japan quake and only five percent of that would be able to reach shorelines as far as that of Canada.

Majority of the garbage would have been sucked down by ocean current and sunk near the east coast of Japan, with some littered along the way, experts said.