Another highly distressing example of how humans are wiping out life as we know it…

17 Pounds Of Plastic Kills Whale, Highlighting Ocean Pollution

NPR

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Overview

Around 80 sopping wet, black plastic bags lined the floor of an operating room in Thailand last week after they were pulled from the stomach of a whale found stranded on a beach.

The pilot whale, which washed ashore in the southern province of Songkhla, later died after veterinarians tried for five days to save its life, according to the country’s Department of Marine and Coastal Resources. An autopsy found nearly 17 pounds of plastic inside the whale’s belly, a marine official told Reuters.

The whale’s death and photos released by the department serve as a reminder of a growing global problem: plastic debris flowing into the ocean and killing wildlife.

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“We are creating the horrible dystopian future that nobody wanted.”

-Enric Sala, an explorer-in-residence and marine ecologist with National Geographic

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How this happens

Scientists at the Thailand Department of Marine and Coastal Services told Reuters the plastic probably ended up in the whale’s stomach because he mistook it for food.

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“Whether it’s a straw or whether it’s a bottle cap, those items can be eaten by animals, and they pose threats through getting stuck in their digestive tracts. It can tear their stomachs. So these products in their entirety are problematic, but what’s equally, if not even more, concerning is that over time these materials are in the ocean, they begin to break up into smaller and smaller pieces.”

-Nick Mallos of the Ocean Conservancy

Some are seizing on the whale’s death to convince Thailand to take steps to reduce the use of plastic bags — either by taxing the companies that make them or taxing the consumers who use them…

A study in the journal Science found the top countries that “mismanaged plastic waste” in 2010 were in the Asia-Pacific region and included China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Sri Lanka and Thailand. Last year, researchers discovered the highest density of garbage in the world on Henderson Island, a remote, uninhabited island in the South Pacific. The study also found that 8 million metric tons of plastic enter the ocean every year from land…

According to a study in the journal Science Advances, of the nearly 8.3 billion metric tons of plastic produced since the 1950s, 6.3 billion has been thrown away. The heavy reliance of plastic is partially linked to the need for packaging products, which made up 54 percent of the plastic thrown out internationally in 2015.

Consumers also throw away millions of single-use plastics, like bags and straws, every day. According to one estimate, roughly 8.5 million plastic straws are discarded annually in the United Kingdom. (Some researchers have raised questions about the methodology of that report, which only measured straws used in fast food restaurants.)

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“People use trillions of plastic bags around the world. And all this plastic ends up killing a million sea birds and 100,000 marine mammals like that one pilot whale that was in Thailand. The problem is that most of these animals die with nobody knowing.”

-Enric Sala, explorer-in-residence and marine ecologist with National Geographic

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The solution, one household at a time

People have become too comfortable with single-use plastics that they don’t need. Experts are encouraging people to look at alternatives like canvas bags and glass, metal or paper straws.

See video: Whale dies after swallowing 80 plastic bags

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