Rotting on the seabed... shameful symbols of our throwaway plastic society
THOUSANDS of feet below the sparkling Caribbean Sea lie the shameful symbols of our throwaway society.
In a world first, the Daily Express can show where most of the plastic in our oceans ends up – at the bottom of the ocean.
Rotting on the seabed beside the world’s second-largest coral reef are plastic bottles, cutlery and cups dumped on land and then swept out to sea to fester.
The pictures show the environmental time bomb created by the world’s love affair with single-use plastic.
This rubbish will stay on the seabed for years, until tide and erosion break it down into tiny shards which will be able to pierce a turtle’s stomach.
Then over time it will fracture into microscopic pieces of plastic which will be eaten by plankton to work their way up the food chain to us.
Shocking images were taken this summer by Thomas Trudel from a submarine, 2,000ft underwater, owned by his friend, American Karl Stanley, 44.
Mr Stanley takes tourists out in the submarines he has built himself to show them the wonders of the deep off the coast of the beautiful Honduran island of WHEN geologists of the future look back at our times, it is plastic that they will define our era by.
Our addiction to single-use plastics has become a problem on a global scale.
As images like these show, the plastic we see on our beaches and coastlines, and even the plastic floating at the surface in the great Pacific garbage patch is only the tip of the iceberg.
Once in the ocean, plastic can sink to the bottom, finding its way into every nook and corner of the seabed where it can remain for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.
But there is a growing movement fighting this tide of plastic pollution, and around the Roatan, whose white beaches and coral reefs are irresistible to holidaymakers and honeymooners. Since
moving to Roatan from New Jersey in the US 20 years ago and setting up Stanley Submarines he has completed 2,000 dives lasting more than 5,000 hours.
He said: “I see plastic pollution on every dive and it has definitely got worse over the years. I did a dive about a month ago where we London of thousands of water fountains to be installed in the city. What is clear is that solutions need to happen fast, and at scale – which means governments need to take action.
At the heart of these solutions has got to be producing less plastic overall.
Unless we start to reduce production we stand little chance of stopping the equivalent of a rubbish truck of plastic entering our oceans every minute.
There is no waste infrastructure anywhere on Earth that can cope with the 300 million tons and rising amount of plastic being made every single year.
Next year Parliament will be discussing an Environment Bill – the first of its kind in years.
Greenpeace, along with many other individuals and organisations will be campaigning to make sure that government is setting reduction targets and providing incentives for businesses and councils that are trying to do the right thing by using less plastic. saw the worst concentration trash I had ever seen at 2,000ft.
“You can recognise 90 per cent of the trash from the labels as being modern. The population of the island is exploding and most of the rubbish is from the island. People are littering up on the hills and after heavy rain it gets washed down into of the sea.” It was particularly bad in one underwater gulley. Erosion has created tunnels up to 200 yards deep like an underwater river.
“My customers get very upset. I don’t think glass and aluminium affect wildlife much. A hermit crab doesn’t care whether it is living in a rock or a bottle. But plastic bottles