Polluted paradise a ‘wake-up call’

SOME 38 million pieces of plastic rubbish were found on one small, remote and uninhabited island in the South Pacific Ocean, an Australian scientist said, highlighting the crisis of plastic pollution in the world.

Jennifer Lavers, a research scientist at the University of Tasmania, said the beaches on UN World Heritage-listed Henderson Island on Pitcairns Group has the world’s highest levels of plastic waste.

The island contains an estimated 37.7 million items of plastic debris, together weighing 17.6 tons, according to the study she published yesterday in a top peer-reviewed journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“This is what I found: The beach is covered in plastic. I have visited many remote islands in the world and this is the worst I have personally seen. It should be a wake-up call,” Lavers said.

Most of the waste was everyday household items, like plastic razors, cigarette lighters, toothbrushes and bottle caps.

The 9km-by-5km island is British overseas territory and is located between South America and New Zealand. Its ecosystems remain relatively unaffected by human contact.

Henderson has one of the world’s last two raised coral atolls. Lavers spent three months on the island in 2015 and collected more than 53 000 pieces of plastic. Lavers said there were 671.6 items per square metre on the surface of the beaches, with more buried less than 10 centimetres deep in the sand.

She said it took a five-person team six hours to survey the beach’s 10-metre section, and up to 260 new items washed up per day on that patch.