Today being rather lovely I went to the beach twice with Sock for nice long rambles. I have got into the habit of picking up plastic trash while I'm walking - it makes the walk more interesting for us both, and since I'm walking along with plastic bags anyway, it just makes sense. It feels good too, we picked up 6 shopping-bags full today, which is just a teency fraction I know, but it's still better than leaving the problem there.
So many people seem not to understand how insidious that plastic junk is. It's death incarnate for the marine eco system, because not only does it trap and drown mammals like dolphins, it gets mistaken for food by fish, turtles and mammals. Once they eat it, they often die from intestinal constiction, and then as their bodies rot the plastic bag comes free and floats off to repeat the cycle. The Sydney Aquarium reckoned about 10 animals can die from one plastic bag before the bag degrades.
The other thing that happens, if they don't die immediately, is that marine birds eat fish that have plastic in their stomachs. Then the bird dies, or (even sadder) it feeds the fish to its chicks and the chicks' stomachs fill up with plastic bits that can't be passed by their systems and they starve to death... with full stomachs.
And if you can stomach that and still walk past plastic on the beach, perhaps you should check to see if you remembered to turn on your humanity this morning. People are the cause of the problem and it's only us that has the opposable thumbs to fix it!
It's also incredibly dangerous to human swimmers to have plastic in the water, because it becomes so heavy. I got tangled in a sheet of plastic that must have blown off the wharf in Wellington. I was about 50 metres (if that!) off shore in Oriental Bay, and I almost drowned. If I hadn't been so paranoid and taken a diving knife with me, I probably *would* have drowned.