Plastic Ruins Paradise

A remote island in the Pacific is being buried in floating plastic garbage. Henderson Island is an uninhabited tropical paradise which is located halfway between New Zealand and Peru. The location would be extremely isolated given that there are no major land masses anywhere near the island.

Unfortunately a freak of geography has made it so that it has one of the highest concentrations of plastic pollution on the planet. Along the beach which is about three kilometers long, nearly 18 tonnes of plastic has accumulated. The sand may not be visible but the several thousand pieces of plastic that get added to the coast surely is an eyesore.

In 1988 the UN World Heritage List had called Henderson Island an untouched paradise. Unfortunately today it’s the final resting place for bottles and containers from Germany, Canada, US, Chile, Argentina and Ecuador. Despite a clean up effort made in 2015, the island continues to be buried under more and more floating plastic that drifts up to its shores. Unless an alternate is found with some science experimentation, the throw away culture of using plastics is going to just make every day worse at the island.