Voyage shows perils of plastic
A waka conducting New Zealand’s first plastic trawl has found microplastics are accumulating in the waters around Kiwi shores.
The Te Matau aMa¯ui pulled up plastics during its voyage from Napier, reaching as far as Cape Palliser, as part of the Waka Odyssey before being turned back by Gita.
Waka captain Raihania Tipoki believed the trawl was the first of its kind conducted in New Zealand waters, and a second waka, Hinemoana, would complete the research in Wellington Harbour on Tuesday.
‘‘Off the Wairarapa Coast we were getting one or two pieces per trawl. Once we got into the harbour at Hawke’s Bay, that’s when you started to see a lot more.’’
Roughly 18 pieces of plastic were captured during one trawl of Hawke’s Bay Harbour, and that did not include nano plastics, which would be counted from samples in a laboratory.
‘‘That’s just a tiny part, if you imagine how much is floating around Hawke’s Bay.’’
The findings were dwarfed by what the team found on Wellington’s Oriental Beach.
In three one-metre transects the team found 230 macro plastics, 146 micro plastics, and 2412 nurdles – an industrial plastic waste that can carry concentrated levels of toxins that enter the marine food chain.
‘‘The nurdle count here is higher than any other beach that our international researchers have seen,’’ Tipoki said.
Speaking before the weekend’s beach survey, Tipoki said one of the researchers on the waka had their own blood tested, and found it contains chemicals contained in plastics.
‘‘The trawl itself is a piece of metal, 600cm wide by about half a foot tall. It’s like a funnel, and the net’s attached to that,’’ he said.
‘‘You’re dragging it through the water for an hour at three knots, so it’s only a small transect of the water that it’s dragged through, but it picks up anything that’s floating.’’
Tipoki said the lack of research into the prevalence and effect of plastics on New Zealand coastlines illustrated how far Kiwis still had to go to dealing with the plastic issue.
‘‘We need to be more forward thinking about all environmental issues.’’
The Waka Odyssey, which concluded with a ceremony on Wel- lington’s waterfront with the arrival of four double-hulled waka and roughly 30 smaller canoes apart of the New Zealand Festival, provided an excellent opportunity to draw attention to a growing issue.
Last year American researchers mapped the edges of the 2.5 million square-kilometre plastic patch, which sat around Easter Island and Robinson Crusoe Island.
An Oceans in Peril panel discussion is to conducted today as part of the New Zealand Festival.