Warning after deadly discovery at remote Aussie beach: 'Holy smokes'
Australians are being encouraged to be mindful of their surroundings this long weekend, and in particular to clean up after themselves (and others) along the country's beaches, after "millions" of tiny microplastics were spotted lining a popular east coast shoreline.
Researchers with conservation organisation Adrift Lab shared photos taken from earlier in January at Bettys Beach, 50km east of Albany, in Western Australia. The group said "despite the remoteness" of the location, the spot "was covered" in millions of microplastics, nurdles, rope and "so many bottle caps".
"Holy smokes," the group wrote on social media. "[It's going to] take us a while to count, weigh, sort and upload the data," the researchers, who study "all things adrift in the ocean", said.
One of the country's leading specialists when it comes to microplastics, Dr Michelle Brewitt, said this Australia Day long weekend, it's more important than ever to monitor our plastic consumption.
Speaking to Yahoo News Australia, Brewitt, of the Australian Microplastic Assessment Project (AUSMAP), warned that with high winds sweeping across the continent, huge volumes of plastics are being swept from overflowing bins into the ocean — where it'll likely remain for decades to come.
Brewitt warned that unless people collectively start taking drastic action, there's little hope of improving the situation.
"There are an estimated 174 trillion pieces of micro plastics currently in the ocean and what is out there will continually break up into smaller and smaller pieces due to sunlight and wave action," she told Yahoo.
"So, unfortunately this problem is highly likely to get worse rather than better.
"Humans of course can help ... to ensure that we aren't leaving our rubbish on the beaches and in our waterways."
Brewitt said the warning is particularly pertinent on busy holidays like this weekend. "I, for example, live close to the beach and all the rubbish bins today are overflowing," she said.
"The wind is blowing and all of the debris just lands on our sand dunes and on our beaches where it will continually break up and into smaller and smaller pieces and be left there to be ingested by our aquatic life — and therefore us."
Blewitt says there are thousands of different ways in which micro and nanoplastics can end up in our waterways, including every time Aussies wash their clothes, when millions of tiny microfibres are shed and released. When these plastics make their way into our oceans, they're often eaten by fish and aquatic life and when humans eat those species, they too ingest the plastic.
"Anything less than five millilitres in size is considered microplastic, and if it gets smaller than one millilitre, it becomes nanoplastics, and then picoplastics, until we're breathing it in," she explained.
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The plastics researcher said that much of this waste is similar in appearance to our native animals' natural diet, and over time, some of it even contract a "smell" that can make them even more enticing to wildlife.
"Industrial pellets are what we call primary microplastics and that gets made from virgin plastic into these round objects that look very much like fish eggs," she said. "They're then being consumed by birds, by fish and by invertebrates that are living in the sediment.
"When microplastics get out in the ocean, it gets coated in fishy, stinky, bloody smells from the sea, and so it becomes very attractive to birds, and to other species that then consume it and then often feed it to their own young as well."
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