Garbage, particularly plastic shopping bags and pop bottles, is piling up on the world's beaches and jeopardizing the lives of marine wildlife, warns one expert.
PhD student Bryson Robertson is two-thirds of the way through a three year, 30,000-nautical-mile sail around the world to study how garbage on the world's waterways and beaches endangers animals.
His travels across the Pacific, Indian and Atlantic Oceans have found that garbage is threatening wildlife, from albatross to turtles.
"Albatross, for example, the mothers regurgitate the food into their babies' mouths," Bryson said Monday during an interview with Canada AM.
"So the mother will go off, find food - plastic, looking beautiful and nice and easy to eat -- they regurgitate it into the babies' mouths and the babies are unable to regurgitate it out of their system. So it fills up their stomachs and kills them."
According to Robertson, plastic shopping bags are the number one killer of turtles, who eat the bags after confusing them with jellyfish.
Garbage that spills into the world's waterways travels across oceans on a rotating system of currents called gyres before it washes up on shore.
Robertson's aim is to educate people about the impact their garbage can have on the environment and on animals thousands of kilometres away.
Robertson has already visited countless beaches, including those in the Kingdom of Tonga, Papua New Guinea, New Zealand, South Africa and Indonesia.
He said the worst he has seen so far is at the Cocos Keeling Islands, Australian territory that is about 1,500 km west of Bali.
"This is a really isolated community with no real garbage that they create. But their beaches are absolutely inundated with Indonesia's garbage."
On one 50 metre stretch of beach, Robertson found 300 flip flops and 200 plastic pop bottles, in addition to "every other imaginable piece of plastic you can think of."
Robertson left Mexico to begin his journey on July 5, 2007, and he's taking a break for hurricane season before setting sail for the Panama Canal.
The crew will head for the biggest pile of garbage, dubbed the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, located in the North Pacific Ocean. They should arrive there early in 2010.
