Plastic Ocean

Plastic is wonderful because it's durable, and plastic is terrible because it is durable. Almost every piece of plastic ever made is still on the planet in some form or another. Plastic production globally this year is expected to be more than 300 million tonnes, half of which we'll use just once and then throw away. By 2050, when the population explodes to almost 10 billion people, it's expected that plastic production will triple. The problem with that is that today only a fraction of the plastic that we produce is recycled. The rest ends up in our environment and it's coating our land and our oceans like a disease. Garbage thrown away in the United States can make its way to Antarctica. Plastic in our coastal waters is pulled into the centre of massive wind-driven churning circular gyres. There are many other ocean currents also diverting the trash all around the surface of the ocean. In reality, it's just one ocean with no boundaries. Lord Howe Island is a World Heritage Site and home to migratory seabirds like the shearwater. Seabirds are incredibly helpful because they act like an army of scientists. They travel thousands of miles across the ocean. They pick up plastic off the surface of the ocean. They bring it back to their rookeries where they feed it to their chicks and that provides an incredible amount of scientific data in terms of where the plastic comes from, its distribution and how it breaks up on the ocean surface. Dr Jennifer Labus, she's devoted her life to studying the plight of seabirds. Shearwaters are incredible birds. They migrate thousands of miles, stopping only here to breed. Yeah, the stomach is very, very full and if we look here, there's some very dark pieces, some very light white pieces and if you see, you know, as I push on this, it's absolutely rigid. Completely, completely full of plastic all the way up. Oh, look at that. Absolutely no doubt that this bird died as a result of that plastic. That is literally a gut full of plastic. It's quite alarming, isn't it? It's awful. Range of plastic types and colours. We've got everything from the blues and the reds. Your stomach's just filled with it. Big pieces too. Big sharp pieces. Oh wow, look at the size of that big black piece. That is an enormous piece of plastic. Unbelievable. Look at the size of that. Jen, I counted 234 pieces of plastic out of that one bird. Is that a record? Not even close, unfortunately. So for the species, the record is 276 pieces of plastic inside of one 90 day old chick. That plastic, when we weighed it out, accounted for 15% of that bird's body mass. So that's a pretty scary statistic. If we translate that into human terms, it gets even worse. That would be equivalent to you and I having somewhere around six or eight kilos of plastic inside of your stomach. It's equivalent to about 12 pizzas worth of food inside of your stomach. It's quite a bit of plastic for just one little bird. The parents were trying to do the right thing. There's a lot of squid beaks in here and this purple colour is evidence of the squid ink. It's just a shame that every now and then they got it wrong and got it wrong in a bad way. Really, it's quite an overwhelming thing. I do have some pretty rough days. I have to go home and really wrap my mind around where do we go from here. As a Pacific Islander, I know that the ocean is in deep trouble. The very authoritative prediction shows that by the year 2050, there'll be as much plastic as there is fish in the ocean by weight. Every country uses plastic. We need to start rationalising that. We need to think about reuse of plastic, single-use plastic. It's got to be on its way out. And you know, plastic shopping bags are a good example of that. Your family does not need to use them. Take a cloth bag with you when you go shopping and put your shopping in there. There's an equivalent of a large garbage truck every minute of every day backing up to the ocean and just dumping plastic into it. We really have to look at ourselves and say, do we deserve this beautiful ocean that was given to us?