Henderson Island: the Pacific paradise groaning under 18 tons of plastic waste | News from the world

Henderson Island, uninhabited and one day crossing under the sign of the closest civilization, should be an untouched paradise.

Instead, its beaches, clbadified as World Heritage by Unesco in 1988, are a monument to the destructive and disposable culture of humanity.

On a sandy beach of 2.5 km, it is estimated that 18 tons of plastic have accumulated over the decades with several thousand pieces of plastic each day.

Because of its isolation in the Pacific, little is known about the island and the origins of garbage that congregate there. For example, in June, a team of scientists, conservationists and two journalists from Stuff.co.nz, New Zealand, spent two weeks collecting six tonnes of waste to better understand.

Henderson Island is a point of land located south of the Pacific Ocean in the Pitcairn Range of Islands. It is located in the third largest marine protected area in the world. Commercial fishing and the mining of the seabed are therefore illegal. With its coconut palms, pink-tinged sand and turquoise waters invading a coral reef, it is an important sanctuary for breeding seabirds and home to four endemic terrestrial birds: a fruit dove, a lorikeet, a reed warbler, and a fiery thief. The atoll is located low in the Pacific, nearly 10 km long and 5 km wide.

Much of the debris drift on East Beach, bordered by a ruthless coral reef and subject to strong winds, making their access possible only via a 75-minute, 5-kilometer hike through dense vegetation and steep coral. sliding.

The cleanup began with marine curator Johnny Briggs who measured a stretch of sand with the help of his running application. The first task was to remove all the buoys from this area.

A total of 1,200 were collected.

Then come the largest pieces of rigid plastic. Containers, water bottles, laundry baskets and toilet seats are packed in bags. Anything bigger than a bottle cap is picked up.

"It takes a lot of time on the hands and knees to grab everything," says US environmentalist Brett Howell, responsible for cleaning. "You certainly feel better when you're looking for buoys and big stuff, because you really see the difference."

Every other day, rigorous data collection techniques are used. Each article is counted, cataloged, weighed and recorded by Briggs and the British recycling expert, James Beard, so that scientists can compare the data with those collected in 2015.

Before the long return trip, a photo marks the end of each day. "It's so rewarding to see the progress being made … you can see that there is a real difference in the appearance of the beach," Beard said.

Despite the protection afforded to the region, the team estimates that 60% of what they recover appears to be badociated with industrial fishing.

Fishing buoys accounted for about 40% of the weight, while ropes and nets accounted for 20%. There were also about a dozen fish aggregating devices (FADs), rudimentary rafts with nets up to 100 meters deep. A buoy connected to a satellite transmitted the location to a fishing boat. Some landed while the cleaning crew was working.

Since fishing is banned in the 830,000 km 2 sanctuary, the New Zealand police and the British government are now investigating the FADs discovered by the cleaning team, with the aim of prosecuting the owners.

In 2012, Pitcairn City Council voted in favor of the creation of the marine reserve, but is powerless against the wave of plastic rods that swept over Henderson's shores.

Garbage is transported on the mighty South Pacific Gyre, a giant current that moves counter-clockwise.

Most plastics are thought to come from South America or pbading ships. However, the team found bottled spirits in Japan, Scotland and Puerto Rico. a rubber boot made in the Netherlands; and a helmet from the United States.

Common household items covered the beach: laundry baskets, toilet seats, razors, toothbrushes and dozens of laces.

The team counted 909 bottle capsules on a 600-meter stretch of sand. The separation of the plugs disturbs the Beard recycling specialist. What happened to the rest of the bottle?

"I imagine at this point that the PET [polyethylene terephthalate] is heavier than plastic lids … and they sink, "he says. "So for every bottle cap, we find that there is a bottle somewhere in the ocean that has sunk to the bottom."

One container, 500 dead animals

In addition to being unsightly, litter can be deadly. Single-use plastics are often found in the stomach of dead seabirds and whales. Other marine creatures become fatally trapped.

The hermit crabs climb into plastic containers, get trapped and starve under the hot sun. The decaying stench attracts other crabs, which also perish. A container of pesticides spilled on the beach contained the corpses of 500 creatures.

Plastics decompose and end up in microplastics, defined as articles less than 5 mm in diameter, and nanoplastics (less than 0.001 mm), which are found in the food chain.

Although the crew removes all visible waste, most of the pollution is concealed and disintegrates on the shoreline. It is estimated that there are 2,000 tiny items per square meter.

Oceanographer Simeon Archer-Rand, of the UK Center for Environmental Science, Fisheries and Aquaculture, searched for waste in the seabed. His underwater camera captured 4,000 images that were badyzed to determine how the junk could have moved on the tides and its effect on marine life.

He also took samples on the beach and covered a tiny particle of plastic, some as thin as a human hair, with a red stain making them visible to ultraviolet light in order to allow their counting.

As the weather got worse during the expedition, the cleaning crew was forced to leave the garbage picked up on the beach. Only a few samples for research have been removed. The rest is now in 13 collection stations, dragged past the high tide line and piled into the beach scrub.

Fourteen other large pieces of plastic were deliberately left on the beach so that four digital cameras could track what happened to them.

Robin Shackell, Deputy Governor of Pitcairn, and Brett Howell, Beach Cleaner, were looking for ways to move the rest of the waste.

Howell hopes that eventually he can be shipped to Costa Rica and transformed into an inexpensive housing material. The non-recyclable plastic is heated and ground into fine light particles called aggregates, which are then added to the concrete.

Howell says that Henderson's pollution is a stark reminder that plastic waste never really vanishes. To solve the problem and keep the debris out of the oceans, we need to change the way consumers use plastic, which is currently treated as a cheap product, to be thrown away after just one use.

"If it is not an alarm bell, we have to change our global supply chains, move to a circular economy, I do not know what it is."