Remote Island Chain Has Few People — But Hundreds Of Millions Of Pieces Of Plastic
"When a marine biologist from Australia traveled to a remote string of islands in the
Indian Ocean to see how much plastic waste had washed up on the beaches, here's just part of what she found: '373,000 toothbrushes and around 975,000 shoes, largely flip-flops,' says Jennifer Lavers of the University of Tasmania in Australia."
"And that's only what was on the surface."
"The Cocos Keeling Islands make up barely 6 square miles of land, about 1,300 miles off the northwest coast of Australia. It was a good place to measure plastic waste because almost no one lives there. That meant the plastic debris there wasn't local — it floated in — and no one was picking it up. It gave Lavers a good notion of just how much was bobbing around the ocean."
"She was flabbergasted."
"'So, more than 414 million pieces of plastic debris are estimated to be currently sitting on the Cocos Keeling Islands, weighing a remarkable 238 tons,' Lavers says.
There are 27 of these islands, most just a few acres in size. Lavers' team of researchers studied seven of them, mostly in 2017, by marking off transects on beaches and counting all the plastic inside each transect. They multiplied that number by the total beach area of all the islands. Lavers had done this before on other remote islands. 'You get to the point where you're feeling that not much is going to surprise you anymore,' she says, 'and then something does ... and that something [on the Cocos Keeling Islands] was actually the amount of debris that was buried.'"