The Island ‘paradise’ Contains 410 Million Pieces Of Trash

The Cocos Islands were once dubbed "a wonderful place in the world" but are now flooded with disposable plastic.
Cocos 'paradise' island contains 410 million pieces of trash
The naturalist Charles Darwin was in love with the Cocos (Keeling) Islands with 27 small atolls in the eastern Indian Ocean. When he arrived here in April 1836, he wrote in Charles Darwin's Beagle Diary, that Cocos is home to the most beautiful white sands, "definitely ranked high in some of the best places in the world".
These 27 islands are offshore territories 1,300 miles from Australia's northwest coast. Palm trees, sand banks, and turquoise sea water still exist

. Photo: Paully Mac.
But a new report published in Scientific Reports shows the sad situation. In 2017, Jennifer Lavers, a marine ecology researcher at the University of Tasmania, visited seven of Cocos' 27 islands, which account for about 88 percent of the archipelago's total area Two of the islands are inhabited with a population of about 600, one of which is a national park with seabirds.




Lavers analyzed samples from lagoons and beaches, examining a variety of sediments, including sand and gravel. To capture debris less visible to the naked eye, Lavers also extracted samples from a depth of 10 cm.
Lavers had seen a lot of trash at the sampling places. She recorded 23,227 pieces of trash in a sand beach. About a quarter of which is disposable plastic, especially straws, toothbrushes and plastic bags, and 60% is microplastic. Several trash samples were identified as flip flops, plastic bottles and ropes.
Cocos' most remote beaches are also littered with rubbish, and even below the sandy shores are full of rubbish Photo: Silke Stuckenbrock.




Connecting data collected on the ground with aerial imagery of the islands, Lavers and colleagues estimated that the total amount of trash that could exist across the entire archipelago was about 414 million pieces. It was like a large human fingerprint smudged on a place where very few people used to be.
The pristine coastline that once fascinated Darwin was part of what drew Lavers to the Cocos Islands. However, the hundreds of millions of pieces of trash on that coastline are typical of things floating around the ocean, when people are unable to properly collect and dispose of their waste.
An unpolluted beach. Photo: Paully Mac.
Lavers notes that 414 million is the minimum estimate. Partly because of the limitations of the extensive survey, partly because the impact range of the plastic waste is already in excess.



Now debris occurs in oceans, rivers and landscapes around the world, from as deep as the Mariana Trench, to as high as the Pyrenees in France.
According to An An / Vnexpress
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