Drowning in junk
SA is being swallowed by plastic
Ornithologist professor Peter Ryan, director of the University of Cape Town’s FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology, began beach surveys in 1984 with 50 beaches, and between then and 2015 did seven surveys at five-year intervals with his wife, marine biologist professor Coleen Moloney.
Each of the 32 beaches surveyed for bottle pollution around SA’s coast was found to have some bottles of foreign origin, but the proportion varied dramatically, from 1% at some urban beaches up to 74% in the remote Namaqualand National Park.
Ryan once found that 190 bits of plastic had been swallowed by one great shearwater, a migratory seabird.
Plastic debris, by nature durable and lightweight, is not confined by borders.
All the way from Indonesia
Ryan found Indonesia was the No 1 source of high-density polyethylene bottles, which float along Africa’s east coast because it is slap bang in the South Equatorial Current, which is a “conveyor belt of plastic litter across the Indian Ocean to Africa”.
Cooldrink bottles, milk jugs, shampoo and bleach bottles are made from this HDPE, which in turn is made from petroleum.
“The Indonesian lids have been through the mill,” says Ryan. “They have been chewed and spat out by umpteen fish over the three or so years it takes to drift across the Indian Ocean. The fish probably are attracted by the barnacles and other marine organisms growing on them.”
In the 1980s, when Ryan landed on uninhabited Inaccessible Island in the South Atlantic, two-thirds of the bottle debris had floated 3,000km from South America with the west wind drift.
By 2009, Asia was a bigger source of this litter and by 2018, most bottles were from China, off ships. found Ryan, who has published more than 60 papers on plastic debris.