A remote Pacific Island is covered in plastic; scientists are determined to clean it up

Thursday, 30 May 2019

A tiny GI Joe lies on the yellow lid of a plastic drum. The tide has washed the toy soldier to the same grey colour as a small, plastic stallion lying further up the beach.

A single, tattered red gumboot stands upright. A little further away, the waves lap at an abandoned black clog. There's a white laundry hamper, a handful of builders' hats, and hundreds of water, shampoo and washing liquid bottles. 

Metres and metres of ghost fishing nets cover the sands and drape over rocks. There are more plastic fishing buoys than you can count, scattered up the coastline and wedged into caves and cliff crevices.

No-one has lived on Henderson Island since the 15th century, but it has the highest density of plastic debris recorded anywhere in the world. Every day 3500 pieces of plastic trash wash up on its pink-tinged coral shores, bobbing on the ocean before they are swept up by the South Pacific Gyre, a powerful rotating current.

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The first time marine scientist Jennifer Lavers visited Henderson Island, she was sitting at her desk at the University of Tasmania's Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies.

'I stumbled upon Google Street View - and of all the places in the world that Google has been to, the Google Street View car actually rolled down the beach at Henderson Island in 2013.'

Lavers was preparing to join a rodent eradication plan on the island. 

As she 'walked' down the beach for the first time using the virtual reality, it wasn't rats she saw. It was plastic.

The discovery both horrified and thrilled her. 

In the early 2000s, Lavers spent months studying seabirds on the French Frigate Shoals in the remote Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. Before the world woke up to the effects of ocean pollution plastic, Lavers was seeing it first-hand, on the beaches and in the bellies of dead birds.

'I remember looking at the plastic in the middle of this remote island - we were five days by boat from the nearest city - and seeing the birds die and bringing up all these toothbrushes and bottle caps, thinking where did it all come from?

'So, I wanted to do research into plastics from that point on and figure out what species were being harmed. That set me off on this course, this trajectory.'

But nothing had prepared her for what she saw when she finally made it to Henderson's northern shores.

Scrambling down a steep and precarious cliff down the northern end of the beach, on one of the most far-flung and remote, uninhabited islands in the world, at first take it appeared pristine and beautiful. 

'You kind of have to stand in awe at where you are and the fact that so few human footprints have ever fallen on this bit of land before you.

'And then you take 20 steps to your right and as you walk the amount of plastic builds, and it builds rapidly. At first, it is fascinating because it is all brightly-coloured, and [you're] finding the weirdest things that don't belong there.' 

Things like babies' dummies, and bicycle pedals.

'How did so many pedals end up on one of the most remote beaches in the whole of the world?'

The fascination and curiosity, the juxtaposition of beauty and tragedy, switched to horror when  spying a quantity of plastic so large  her brain struggled to process.

There was no sand. Just 'a constant sheet of plastic of all shapes and sizes'.

For Lavers, an eco-toxicologist who has spent years studying marine pollution, it was a defining moment.

'I remember coming across this huge net - three-quarters of it was buried. What I could see had been exposed to the UV, the wind and everything for so long it had fragmented into millions of pieces of nylon that had scattered in the wind in all directions. The beach was completely turquoise in all directions.

One net, exposed to the elements, had fragmented into millions of pieces of nylon which had scattered in all directions. It was disintegrating in front of Lavers' eyes, she says, turning into micro and nano-plastics and bound for the ocean. 

'I stood there thinking there is nothing a single human on this planet could do to stop this. I couldn't get it out of the ground, or on the boat - it had already obliterated itself into pieces. I just didn't know what to do with myself. I probably felt the most helpless I ever felt.'

Lavers and Alex Bond, an ecologist and conservation biologist based at the Natural History Museum, spent their free time on the pest-control mission cataloguing, weighing and analysing the trash.

They collected around 55,000 pieces and traced 100 back to their country of origin. They estimated nearly 18 tons of plastic - or 37 million pieces - was piled up on the island, with two-thirds of it buried in the sands. They photographed a dead, green sea turtle, ensnared in fishing lines, and saw hermit crabs making their homes in plastic bottle caps.

Their 2017 paper caused a sensation. 

Two years later Lavers and Bond are returning to Henderson Island with a team of international scientists, environmentalists and award-winning British photographic artist Mandy Barker. The expedition is backed by the UK Government and Pew Trusts. 

The scientists will investigate the quantity of plastics, the rate of accumulation and the impact on the local wildlife, the surrounding coral reefs, seabed, water quality and sediment. For 16 nights, the team will sleep and eat on the Bravo Supporter ship moored off the island. They'll spend their days combing the beaches, and picking up trash. Thousands of pieces of rubbish will then be packed into the ship's hold and removed from the island. 

Stuff journalists Andrea Vance and Iain McGregor will document the world-first expedition and are set to embark on the adventure on Sunday. 

It takes six days to travel the 5529 km from Wellington to Henderson Island, one of the most remote places in the world.

An elevated coral atoll, it is one of four islands in the Pitcairn Island cluster, a British Overseas Territory.

Named after Captain James Henderson, no-one but a handful of shipwrecked survivors have lived there since the 15th century. One brackish freshwater spring, poor soil and a ring of 15 metre high cliffs make its 3700 hectares inhospitable.

The nearest community is the 50 or so Pitcairn Islanders, about 200 km south west. Mangareva, the nearest port, is almost 700km away in the Gambier Islands. 

Logistically, that makes the Henderson Island Expedition an epic feat of organisation. 

Deputy Governor of the Pitcairn Islands Robin Shackell is in charge and described the location - 'slap-bang in the middle of the Pacific' - as 'challenging' to get to.

Shackell visited with an advance team and some Pitcairn Islanders in March and was disturbed.

'You have got an outstandingly beautiful beach of fine, pink sand. In any resort in the world you would sell it in a glossy magazine. Then there is the sheer quantity of the plastic and the variety.'

He describes plastic toys, buoys, masses of fishing nets, crates, plastic and glass bottles, containers, plastic bins, even restaurant bins branded 'stolen from Talley's'.  

A plastic buoy was filled with water with infant hermit crabs trapped inside. Most were dead,  a few live ones were set free. Turtle tracks could be seen criss-crossing the sand as they tried to avoid the rubbish on the way to lay eggs. 

He also saw toothbrushes, a gas canister and even a fridge door. The trash originated from Croatia, Sydney, Taiwan; Honduras and Spain.

Shackell says its not possible to remove all the plastic thanks to some being so disintegrated, but they can clear up large items, and document them.

The team will also set up monitoring equipment and cameras to watch the rate of accumulation.

British High Commissioner to New Zealand Laura Clarke is also Governor of the Pitcairn Island. 

Henderson Island is a Unesco World Heritage Site.

In 2015 the British Government established one of the world's largest marine protected areas around the archipelago. Commercial fishing is banned in an 834,334 square kilometres area which is patrolled by satellite and the French and British navies.

That it is now heavily polluted with plastic is deeply distressing to the islanders, Clarke says. 

'It is just so beautiful and so remote. You spend two days on the boat just to get to Pitcairn and then you arrive at dawn…when you looked down in the sea there were hundreds of sharks just circling our boat, interested in the lights.' 

She says the people are something special, too.

'I often say, if there was Unesco-type designation for human communities, the Pitcairn community would have it. They have existed against the odds since 1790, been through an extraordinary amount.

'And they are really committed to tackling this - and really committed to Pitcairn, in its small way, playing a part in these global issues.'

Brett Howell is leading the clean-up part of the expedition. He hopes to pick up 10 tons of waste - around 8.5 tons of which will be plastics - from a 2 km stretch of the beach. He says it's a 'life changing opportunity' and an 'epic challenge.'

For months, he's been working out what to do with the collected trash. Possible solutions include grinding or melting it down for re-use on Pitcairn; taking it to another country for recycling - although that presents a biosecurity risk; turning it into an art display; or using the material for a plastic-to-fuel project.

Howell is fully expecting backbreaking work, for long hours under the sun. But, if everything goes to plan the 'tragic plastics' will become part of a wider story about collaborating for breakthrough solutions to end plastic pollution, he says. 

The ultimate goal is to get as much plastic as possible in two weeks, advance science and educate the world. 

'We need to get people to understand that why it is so important that the choices they make impact places on the other side of the planet.'