The world’s plastic island
New research has revealed that a remote, uninhabited island in the South Pacific is suffering from a serious plastic-rubbish problem. A staggering 37.7 million pieces of debris are estimated to be covering Henderson Island’s beaches. Land crabs have even been spotted making homes inside containers, cosmetics jars and bottle caps.
Henderson Island lies west of South America, near an ocean current called the South Pacific Gyre. The current means that most of the rubbish from nearby boats, as well as from South America, ends up on the island. It is thought to be one of the few islands left in the world more or less untouched by humans – except for all this rubbish. Wildlife has mostly been able to evolve unhindered, and there are 10 species of plant and four land birds indigenous (only found in a certain place) to the island.
The study was carried out by the University of Tasmania’s Institute of Marine and Antarctic Studies in Australia, and the UK’s Centre for Conservation Science at th eRoya l Society for the Protection of Birds. It found that the rubbish on the island amounted to 671 pieces for every square metre of land. However, most of the items found on the island were in fact buried as much as 10 centimetres beneath the sand, and around 13,000 new bits of debris washed ashore every day. One of the researchers, Dr Jennifer Lavers from the University of Tasmania, said that “a lot of the items on Henderson Island are what we... refer to as disposable or single-use”. As well as equipment used to fish, the beaches of Henderson Island were also littered with items such as toothbrushes, and even hard hats. The team behind the study hope that their research will inspire people to “rethink their relationship with plastic”.