Aldabra Atoll - Remote, Restricted & World Heritage Site - Has At Least 500 Tons Of Plastic Trash
Off Africa’s eastern coast, north of Madagascar, lies Aldabra Atoll, a cluster of coral islands that surround a tropical lagoon. Aldabra is a UN World Heritage Site that’s home to a stunning array of wildlife, including tens of thousands of wild giant tortoises, far more tortoises than in the Galapagos Islands. Sir David Attenborough, the documentary filmmaker, has called Aldabra “one of the wonders of the world.” The atoll is exceedingly difficult to visit, not only because it’s so remote, but also because new arrivals must contend with a $225 per-visitor daily environmental impact fee — as well as piracy in the region.
This wild, protected place is also, according to newly published research from Oxford University, littered with over 500 tons of plastic waste. That’s the amount remaining after the Oxford team itself removed 25 tons of plastic debris, a manufactured mountain of plastic trash that included 360,000 used flip flop sandals and literal tons of plastic nets, ropes and other fishing industry trash. “This is the largest accumulation of plastic waste reported for any single island in the world,” Oxford noted as the findings were announced. The story of how even one the most inaccessible places on Earth has become clogged with plastic trash and industrial waste starts, in some ways, with a deliberate deception.
Back in 1989, according to an extraordinary new investigation by NPR and PBS Frontline, executives from Exxon, Chevron, Amoco, Dow, DuPont, Procter & Gamble and others met privately at the Ritz-Carlton in Washington D.C., where they discussed the growing problem of plastic trash. Since the 1950’s, the world has produced over 8.3 billion tons of plastic, according to UN Environment, virtually all of it derived from fossil fuels. During the 1970’s and 80’s, plastic waste generation rates more than tripled, causing growing concern among consumers. “The image of plastics is deteriorating at an alarming rate,” Larry Thomas, a former president of a plastics industry association, wrote in records obtained by NPR from that meeting. “We are approaching a point of no return.”
The solution the gathered executives arrived at, NPR found, was to advertise a solution that industry officials knew was unworkable: recycling. “They knew that the infrastructure wasn't there to really have recycling amount to a whole lot,” Thomas, now turned whistleblower, told NPR. Nonetheless, the plastics and oil industries forged ahead. They launched and advertised plastics recycling initiatives (which NPR found all fizzled within a handful of years), campaigned for states to require plastic goods to carry a triangle of arrows around a recycling code, and convinced consumers to dutifully sort their plastic trash alongside items that can genuinely be profitably recycled, like glass and metal.
The campaigns resulted in very little actual plastic being recycled. Less than ten percent of the plastic ever made has been recycled even once, a 2017 peer-reviewed scientific paper found — and global recycling ran further aground the following year, when China banned imports of most used plastics after that nation’s attempts at processing and recycling the world’s plastic scrap became inescapably overwhelmed.
EDIT
https://www.desmogblog.com/2020/09/14/oil-industry-s-shift-plastics-question-report-warns-400-billion-stranded-assets-possible
