Key findings of the survey:
- The beaches on the Cocos (Keeling) Islands are littered with 238 tonnes of plastic. There are an estimated 414 million pieces of plastic including nearly one million shoes and 370,000 toothbrushes on the beaches of island.
- As a result of the growth in single-use consumer plastics, it's estimated there are now 25 trillion pieces of ocean plastic debris.
- The scale of the problem means cleaning up our oceans is currently not possible, and cleaning beaches, once they are polluted with plastic, is time consuming and costly.
- The only viable solution is to reduce plastic production and consumption while improving waste management to stop this material entering our oceans in the first place.
Comment:
- According to Jennifer Lavers from the University of Tasmania, Australia, remote islands which do not have large human populations depositing rubbish nearby are an indicator of the amount of plastic debris circulating in the world's oceans.
- Her research in 2017 revealed that beaches on remote Henderson Island in the South Pacific had the highest density of plastic debris reported anywhere on Earth.
