‘Horrific’ deaths from soft plastic

A third of turtles found dead on New Zealand beaches have swallowed plastic, an expert says, and single-use shopping bags are the most common culprit.

Dan Godoy, of Massey University’s Coastal-Marine Research Group, said the turtles’ intestinal tract became blocked when they mistook soft plastics for jellyfish, resulting in ‘‘horrific’’ deaths.

‘‘In the turtles that I’ve looked at, and [from] other studies around the world, it’s the soft, white, and translucent plastics items – so plastic bags particularly – that are consumed in a higher proportion than other items,’’ Godoy said.

The Government has been facing mounting pressure from local bodies, environmental groups, and schoolchildren to take action over the more than a billion plastic bags Kiwis discard annually.

So far, there has been no real movement on the problem.

Godoy had studied the bodies of roughly 80 stranded turtles over the past six years, and said of those with plastic in their stomachs, about half had died as a direct result.

On one occasion, he was able to tell by the label that the plastic wrapping had come from Lower Hutt.

Godoy said the argument he had heard from Environment Minister Nick Smith in the past – that action was not needed as plastic bags made up only a small percentage of the waste stream – failed to look at the facts, or the environmental impact of plastic bags.

‘‘It has a huge impact because it looks like natural prey; it goes out in the oceans, it doesn’t break down, and they float in the water column continuously until they are either ingested or entangle an animal,’’ he said.