Plastic bags vs Whitey the crocodile
This is a guest blog post from a friend of the Envirosax team who is currently backpacking around Australia. Having never lived in a coastal environment before, her perspective on a problem us coast-dwellers are sometimes complacent about is a refreshing wake-up call.
Traveling around the East coast of Australia I’ve been hearing stories from scuba divers, aquarium workers and locals on the beaches, about the growing problem of plastic bags on marine habitats. The most common story is of turtles dying after swallowing plastic bags they have mistaken for jellyfish. However this is hard to comprehend when there is limited coverage on the exact effects of disposable plastic bags on wildlife. Or so I thought, until last weekend when I read in the local news that a 3.5m crocodile died of starvation after swallowing 25 plastic shopping and garbage bags, a plastic wine cooler and a rubber float. The build up of plastic in his stomach prevented him from digesting food and led to his death in captivity on Sunday, after being taken in by authorities the previous day. What a horrible way to go.
After reading this I did a bit more research in to the actual numbers of wildlife deaths from plastic, and found that the Australian Seabird Rescue estimate that there are about 100,000 animals killed by plastic each year… so apparently our crocodile Whitey, as he was named, is far from the only casualty.
The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority said Whitey’s death “reinforces our general view that the amount of marine debris in the ocean is too much and it’s damaging wildlife.”
Spending even a small amount of time researching the dangers of plastic bags turns up a frightening amount of information, but one that made the most impact on me was this documentary from Vice Magazine about the colossal amount of plastic waste (larger than Texas apparently!) now collecting in the middle of the Pacific Ocean:
