Remote island beach plastics point to greater waste problem
The world may be seriously underestimating the amount of plastic waste along its coastlines, researchers said as they unveiled findings showing hundreds of millions of plastic fragments on a remote Indian Ocean archipelago.
A team of experts travelled to the Cocos Islands, a group of 27 small atolls 2,100 kilometres west of Australia and found an estimated 414 million pieces of plastic.
In all, the plastic fragments would weigh around 238 tonnes, the team said.
Images taken from the survey show white sand beaches blanketed with plastic waste.
But according to lead study author Jennifer Lavers, who is from the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies at the University of Tasmania, the fragments on the surface of Cocos Island beaches – and beaches around the world – may just be the tip of the iceberg.
“I’ve been working on remote islands as a marine biologist for 15 years or so and all of them have at least some debris, so I’ve come to expect it,” she told AFP.
“One of the big surprises was that when I was digging down in the sediment to look at how much was buried and where, the quantity sometimes did not drop off with depth.” Lavers and the team dug multiple holes across beaches on the Cocos Islands, and found plastics, mainly in the form of small or microparticles, throughout the sand layers.
They estimate that the true amount of plastic pollution on the beaches surveyed may be as much as 26 times greater than the fragments visible on the surface.
The study, published in the journal Nature Scientific Reports, concludes that global plastic waste surveys “have drastically underestimated the scale of debris accumulation”.
Plastic production has exploded worldwide in recent years, with half of all plastics produced in the last 13 years. — AFP