A hermit crab living in a make-up pot. A turtle strangled by an old cord. It’s miles from civilisation but this deserted atoll is STILL choked with 37million pieces of our rubbish
Even by desert island standards, this one is remote — a soulless patch of coral and trees not much larger than Gigha marooned 3,000 miles from the nearest town.
So you might expect Henderson Island in the South Pacific — home to rare seabirds and endangered species such as the green turtle — to be a natural paradise.
And yet, as these deeply disturbing pictures show, it is one of the most polluted places on earth.
More than 37 million pieces of plastic rubbish, weighing an estimated 17 tons, have washed up on its shores, threatening the existence of the island’s ecosystem.
A hermit crab making its home in an old cosmetics jar epitomises the tragic state of affairs on what remains one of the furthest flung remnants of the old British empire.
Henderson Island is still British territory, nominally attached to one of our tiniest overseas territories, Pitcairn Island (population: 50), 120 miles to the southwest. Uninhabited it may be. Untouched by human hand it most certainly is not.
A report out today in the prestigious U.S. journal, Proceedings Of The national Academy Of Sciences, reveals that every single square metre of Henderson’s coastand line is littered with plastic detritus ranging from bags and fishing nets to toothbrushes, buoys, packaging, hair combs, cigarette lighters and the odd whisky bottle.
Manufactured mainly in the last couple of decades, it has all been discarded by people many thousands of miles away who know nothing of Henderson Island. Poor Henderson Island, however, knows all about them.
‘The density of debris was the highest reported anywhere in the world, up to 671.6 items per metre squared on the surface of the beaches,’ according to the landmark report by Jennifer Lavers of the University of Tasmania, and Alexander Bond of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.
Their findings follow a 2015 study of the island’s wildlife.
These images show only the tip of the iceberg since 68 per cent of the plastic is buried beneath at least 10 cm of sand.
A particularly grim sight is a turtle which has been killed by a tangle of nets and cords caught around its flipper.
What compounds the pollution is the fact that the island is in the path of prevailing anti-clockwise currents that sweep the Pacific’s rubbish into a vortex. The island has never been subjected to any sort of clean-up operation.
‘I’ve seen a lot of plastics on my travels — in some of the most remote places — but Henderson Island tops the cake,’ Dr Lavers told the Daily Mail. Despite studying the subject for more than a decade, she was stunned by what she found. ‘The quantity of plastic [on Henderson] is truly alarming takes your breath away.’ A 1991 study of plastic pollution on two similar atolls in the same part of the Pacific, Ducie and Aeno, reported a ‘frighteningly large’ quantity of waste.
But that amounted to no more than one piece of plastic per square metre, a figure dwarfed by the state of Henderson Island.
Using that data as a guide, the researchers estimate that, since 1991, plastic levels have increased each year by between 7 and 80 per