Even the pristine hinterlands aren’t pristine anymore. In the early 1990s, British zoologist Tim Benton took a walk along a mile of shoreline on Ducie Island, a speck of land 4,970 miles east of Australia. Here’s what he found:
- 268 unidentifiable pieces of plastic
- 171 glass bottles
- 74 bottle tops
- 71 plastic bottles
- 67 small buoys
- 66 buoy fragments
- 46 large buoys
- 44 pieces of rope
- 29 segments of plastic pipe
- 25 shoes
- 18 jars
- 14 crates
- 8 pieces of copper sheeting
- 7 aerosol cans
- 7 food and drink cans
- 6 fluorescent tubes
- 6 light bulbs
- 4 jerry cans
- 3 cigarette lighters
- 2 pen tops
- 2 dolls’ heads
- 2 gloves (a pair)
- 1 asthma inhaler
- 1 construction worker’s hat
- 1 football (punctured)
- 1 glue syringe
- 1 truck tire
- 1 plastic coat hanger
- 1 plastic foot mat
- 1 plastic skittle
- 1 small gas cylinder
- 1 tea strainer
- 1 tinned meat pie
- 1 toy soldier
And “0.5 toy airplane.” That’s 953 items of debris altogether, on an island of 2.5 square miles, in the least populous country in the world.