The problem with plastic pollution in the ocean

The amount of plastic that ends up in our seas annually is currently estimated to be 12.7 million tons, and this includes microbeads as well as plastic bottles and bags. That’s a truckload of rubbish a minute.

Travelling on ocean currents this plastic is now turning up in every corner of our planet – from Cornish beaches to uninhabited Pacific islands. It is even being found trapped in Arctic ice.

It's frightening how our oceans are steadily becoming a plastic soup and affecting marine life. Large plastic fragments are strangling seabirds and turtles, while little bits are clogging the intestines of animals, including whales and tiny zooplankton, which confuse them for food. These days, plastic finds its way into the seafood that is served to us as well.

A young whale that washed up in the Philippines a few months ago passed away from "gastric shock" after consuming 40 kg of plastic bags.

When the young Cuvier's beaked whale washed ashore, marine biologists and volunteers from the D'Bone Collector Museum in Davao City, on the Philippine island of Mindanao, learned of its horrific manner of death, they were horrified.

The museum revealed on their Facebook page that they had found "40 kilos of plastic bags, including 16 rice sacks." The remark was quite negative. After performing an autopsy, they found "four banana plantation-style bags and numerous shopping bags" in the whale's stomach.

Pictures from the autopsy revealed countless mounds of trash being removed from the animal's interior; it was said that the animal had died of "gastric shock" as a result of consuming all the plastic.

"The most plastic we have ever seen in a whale," according to the autopsy biologists from the D' Bone Collector Museum.

57 dead whales and dolphins that have been examined over the past ten years by marine biologist and D'Bone Collector Museum owner Darrell Blatchley have been found to have died from an accumulation of trash and plastic in their stomachs.

More than eighty plastic bags, weighing up to eight kilograms (18 pounds), were swallowed by a whale that died in southern Thailand in June of last year. According to marine biologists, every year in Thai waters, about 300 marine animals, including dolphins, sea turtles, and pilot whales, pass away from plastic poisoning.

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