An Australian woman says she once picked up 500 plastic sand toys from the beach, filling up 17 bags of rubbish in a single day, and the heartbreaking photos highlight the devastating impact of our “throwaway society” on marine life. Suzanne Casement, who collects rubbish every day from one of the country’s most famous beaches, says she has come across some shocking sights, including a weedy seadragon tangled in a face mask.
Mr Casement, from Coogee in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, said he had been voluntarily picking up litter from the beach on his daily walks for eight years and was shocked by what people were leaving behind and the danger it posed to marine life including birds, turtles and fish.
The 57-year-old said she once found a dead wolf with a cigarette burnt on its head and has uncovered many other examples of thoughtless human actions that wreak havoc on native wildlife and the environment.
“I’ve seen people come to the beach with a cheese platter and a bottle of wine and then leave their board, glasses and everything behind,” she told Yahoo News Australia.
“A lot of people have parties, engagements, birthday parties on the beach and they just leave the balloons there. They throw them in the bin but don’t deflate them or untie them so they just fly away and can cause serious damage to wildlife. Or sometimes one balloon gets away and gets tangled and washed out to sea.”
She said people needed to learn the “right behaviour”, such as deflating balloons and disposing of them properly, to prevent them breaking down into microplastics and being ingested by animals.
“We’re a throwaway society, so people just leave things lying around when they’re done using them. It’s unbelievable,” Casement told Yahoo. “One time I picked up 14 pairs of sunglasses from the ocean. I’ve seen all kinds of things come out of the ocean.
“When people dump rubbish on the beach, it gets washed out to sea and comes back again, harming wildlife. I’ve seen sea dragons with masks on, turtles with rubbish strewn around them, fishing hooks and lines caught in seagulls. It’s heartbreaking to see wildlife being harmed.”
“It really annoys me that other people don’t pick up their rubbish like I do, they just ignore it. There are a lot of people who come to Coogee Beach to watch the sunrise, they sit there chatting, they see rubbish and they think ‘it’s not mine’ and just leave it there.”
He said Sydney’s Airport Beach had been “invaded” by rubbish that had travelled down Cooks River and was particularly bad after storms, with cigarette butts, syringes, rubbish and plastic strewn everywhere.
To her surprise, she found Mars Bar wrappers dating back to 1981 and drink containers featuring Fred Flintstone characters that the 57-year-old remembers from her childhood.
“It’s really sad,” she says. “One day we found 1,700 straws in one day. They were sticking out of the sand, and it looked like a graveyard.”
Ms Casement said she wanted to raise awareness of the “staggering” amount of rubbish left on Australian beaches, including towels, sunglasses and umbrellas.
Wildlife expert says plastic pollution at ‘crisis level’
WWF Australia plastics expert Kate Noble said plastic pollution had reached “crisis levels and is still growing”.
“Most of the plastic ever produced is still there, buried, dumped or even worse, left in our natural environment to break down into microplastics rather than decompose,” she told Yahoo News. “Microplastics are tiny, but they’re a big problem.
“Research shows it’s everywhere, from the fish we eat to the water we drink and even inside our bodies. The long-term impacts of this on human health and marine ecosystems are still being investigated, but the early signs are alarming.”
She said it was widely known that plastic pollution was having a “devastating impact” on marine life, particularly seabirds and turtles, which mistake plastic for food, making them more susceptible to disease and death.
“This includes everything from small plastic particles to items such as balloons and soft plastic bags that are known to be particularly deadly to wildlife,” Noble said.
“In Australia, it’s estimated that up to 145,000 tonnes of plastic enters the environment each year. Globally, it’s estimated that 19 to 23 million metric tonnes (MMT) enters waterways each year.”
Surprisingly, Australia consumes more single-use plastic per capita than any other country except Singapore, she added.
Anti-plastics campaigner Anita Horan told Yahoo that there are more than five trillion pieces of plastic floating in the ocean and that the health risks they pose are “widespread and detrimental”.
“More than 40 percent of plastic is used once and then thrown away,” she said.
“And yet we know all this, and yet plastic production is growing exponentially, with projections that by 2060 plastic production will triple.”
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