Eat fish and you’ll be eating plastic, warns Prince Charles

THE Prince of Wales has warned that “plastic is on the menu” due to the increasing amounts found in fish caught for the dinner table.

He said decisive action must be taken to deal with plastic pollution in order to save the world’s marine life.

“The eight million tons of plastic that enter the sea every year – through our own doing, I might add – is now almost ubiquitous,” the Prince told delegates at the Our Ocean summit in Malta.

“All the plastic that we have produced since the 1950s that has ended up in the ocean is still with us in one form or another, so that wherever you swim there are particles of plastic near you, and we are very close to reaching the point when whatever wild-caught fish you eat will contain plastic. Plastic is indeed now on the menu.”

The Prince warned that the growing threat to the world’s marine ecology had reached a critical point.

He told delegates at the Our Ocean summit in Malta it was crucial to create a circular economy that allows plastics to be “recovered, recycled and reused instead of created, used and then thrown away” but said the “sense of urgency” was still lacking.

Each year, more than 300 million tons of plastic are produced globally, of which 10 per cent will end up in the sea – the equivalent of a rubbish truck of waste every minute. By 2050, that will increase to four trucks every minute.

A report published last year by the World Economic Forum estimated that there is now a 1:2 ratio of plastic to plankton and, left unchecked, plastic will outweigh fish by 2050.

Chemicals leach into the water and it has been shown that humans who eat seafood ingest 11,000 pieces of microplastic each year.

Last month, Sir David Attenborough launched a new series of Blue Planet, which highlights what he calls the “catastrophic effects” of the release of an estimated five trillion pieces of plastic in the world’s seas.