Transcript
The UN reports that more than eight-million tonnes of plastic ends up in the ocean every year. That wreaks havoc on marine wildlife, fisheries and tourism, and costs at least 8-billion US dollars in damage to marine ecosystems. Its urging Governments and businesses to eliminate microplastics in cosmetics, ban or tax single-use plastic bags and dramatically reduce the use of other disposable plastics by the year 2022. Otherwise it warns that by 2050, there could be more plastic than fish in the ocean. In a video to launch the campaign, the President of the UN General Assembly, Peter Thomson, who is Fiji's former representative to the UN, says the world needs to take action fast. Some countries and territories in the Pacific have already taken the first step by banning plastic bags including American Samoa, the Marshall Islands and the Micronesian state of Yap.There are already grass-roots organisations in the Pacific working to reduce waste and protect marine life.That includes the environmental NGO, Te Ipukarea Society in the Cook Islands.Its technical director, Kelvin Passfield, says while he is heartened by the UN campaign, there is a huge task ahead.
"Just about every fish that you open, if you look at the gut contents, there will be some sort of plastic in there. Every seabird that you find dead on some of these seabird breeding islands, like our own Suwarrow up in the north, y'know, you'll find their guts are fill of plastic."
Mr Passfield says foreign fishing fleets are no doubt also contributing to marine pollution in the Pacific by throwing rubbish overboard. He says he hopes that the Cook Islands and other Pacific nations join the UN campaign as that will put more pressure on bigger polluters and countries producing the plastic.
"I think that everybody needs to get behind it and support it and just hope that it hasn't gone past the threshold, the tipping point, that's the problem with the way we're treating the world - if we push it too far it's going to just tip over that point where it can't bounce back."
Birdlife International, which is a global partnership of conservation organisations, says there needs to be more research into the effect of plastic pollution on bird populations. Its regional co-ordinator for the Pacific, Karen Baird, says she has no doubt the situation will reach a point where marine pollution will soon become a huge issue for the Pacific.
"The problem is of course that plastics just don't break down or at least they break down into something called micro-plastics, which is then ingested by both fish and seabirds and then potentially passed up the foodchain to humans. So, because it's not breaking down, and we are continuing to pour it into the ocean, then the inevitable outcome is that we will start to see population level impacts on seabirds in the Pacific."
The Plastic Pollution Coalition, which is based in the US and has partners in the Pacific, says legislation could be one of the most powerful tools for small island nations. It's chief executive and co-founder, Dianna Cohen, says it's also important to put pressure on big companies, which choose to use disposable plastic for their products and packaging.
"They're going to need to step up and change and there needs to be pressure from governments in terms of bans and legislation and how we incentivise the changes that we need to see happen that we need in order to stop contributing to this problem, because it's not a problem that we're going to clean up."
Dianna Cohen says it is particularly challenging for small Pacific nations, some of which lack the infrastructure to dispose of plastic waste.
"The problem with any island that you go to is that they're importing all of the materials onto the island and there's no way to get that stuff off and so a lot of those places unfortunately burn things or they end up getting dumped in the ocean."
Meanwhile others, such as Dutch entrepreneur and inventor, Boyan Slat, continue to work on innovative solutions to try and help rid the oceans of plastic. Mr Slat, who is the founder of The Ocean Cleanup, is focussing on developing what he calls passive cleanup units. These units use the ocean's currents to capture ocean debris, such as plastic, so it can be more easily collected and disposed of.
