Plastic waste major threat to New Zealand seabirds

Forest and Bird is demanding the government end the production of single-use plastic pointing to research showing the Tasman Sea is the riskiest place in the world for seabirds for ingesting pieces of plastic.

On current trends it is predicted that by 2050 there will be more pieces of plastic in the oceans than fish. An international research paper shows a dangerous overlap between this tidal wave of plastic and the abundance of seabirds in the Tasman Sea which is populated by a staggering one third of the world’s seabird species.