Transcript
JENNIFER LAVERS - Having spent ten plus years studying plastic pollution in the world's oceans, you get to the point where not really a lot surprises you anymore, but when you stand on a beach that looks like the beaches on Henderson Island, there's absolutely no denying that it's unique for all the wrong reasons and it takes your breath away. The one and only thing that came to mind, what I felt I absolutely had to do at that moment was tell the story of Henderson Island, show people what's happening out there, in the big blue, in places that are kind of out of sight, out of mind. It kind of struck me as one of those away places. When we think we are throwing something away, that miracle place that is away is places like Henderson island. That is ultimately where our rubbish is ending up, and that's not okay.
SELA JANE AHOLELEI - How does Henderson Island, an uninhabited atoll, accumulate so much rubbish?
JL - So Henderson, a key point to... Henderson is uninhabited and always has been, so there is no human population there. If ever there was a speck of land on this planet that should be pristine from end to end, it's Henderson. It's 5,000km from the nearest metropolitan centre. It's World Heritage listed. It's been on the UNESCO list since 1988. It's contained within the second largest marine park in the world. It's remarkably remote and special and yet here it is plagued with the waste of the modern world. It' s a problem, a real problem.
SJA - Comments around this new finding are comparing plastic pollution to climate change because of its threat to humanity. Is this fair to say?
JL - Climate change like so many global threats is just that. It's a widespread threat that affects each and everyone of us relatively equally, so whether that's ocean acidification or sea level rise, we all contribute to it and we are all going to bear the repercussions of it, and another key point in that is if we don't all work together, we can't solve these problems, so one country can't fix climate change because we need to work together. The same can be said for plastic. It's an international issue and like climate change, it's rapidly increasing in severity, even more so than climate change. I think a couple of points of distinction there are climate change has been relatively slow to change and that is part of why people struggle to grasp these changes and to feel motivated to do something about it. With plastics, that's not the case. We've only been mass producing plastic for about 70 years and the rate it which its accumulated in the ocean and the impact it's having on wildlife is phenomenal. Our current estimates are in excess of 5 trillion pieces of plastic in just the surface layer of the world's oceans and more than 1,200 marine species negatively impacted. I mean if that doesn't set off alarm bells, I honestly don't know what will.
SJA - The increase in the density of plastic rubbish in such a short period of time, you said around 70 years, illustrates how serious of an issue plastic pollution is...
JL - Yeah so like I said the global estimate is about 1,200 marine species impacted as of 2016 and that number has increased rapidly in recent years, so in the mid 1990s, the estimate was only 265 marine species. In 2015, that was 693 marine species. Between 2015 and 2016-17 in the span of a year, perhaps two years at the very most, that number sky rocketed from 693 marine species negatively impacted to more than 1,200. Now that's an artefact of more people, more scientists looking for impacts, but it's also a true reflection of the scale of the problem that we now face.
SJA - What do you see as a solution to help counter plastic pollution?
JL - There's a couple of key things that I kind of like to say is; recycle really should be the last stop on your list. There's the 3 R's. Reduce, reuse, recycle and reduce really needs to be number one key. We need to reduce our addiction and our consumption patterns first of all. Recycle is really, the end point and it should be where you go when you have no other option. It's not the quick fix that we all think it is. It's plagued with problems. It's an imperfect solution. The other one that I would like to add to that is a fourth R, which is Refuse. Refuse plastic straws, plastic bags, plastic microbead scrubs in your products. All of those kind of things, there is a lot that we can all do to refuse plastic in the first place and it is that collective movement that will have the largest impact. Individuals do matter, but it's when we scale it up with our whole society, when we all kind of change the norm. Right now I'm the weirdo that collects other people's rubbish from storm water drains because I know that if it sneaks into storm water drains, it sneaks into the ocean, but maybe one day I won't be a weirdo anymore and it will be common place for us to all collect other people's rubbish because we're all aware of exactly where it's headed and what that all means.
