Revealed: The World's Most Polluted Island
The island is home to 17,000 kilogrammes of human trash.
16 May 2017
Editor
image credit: Jennifer Lavers and Alexander Bond
Henderson Island - a remote, uninhabited island located in the south Pacific has been named as the world's most polluted island.
What should have been a pristine island is now a human wasteland with over 17,000 kilogrammes of trash and 37 million bits of plastic that have washed up on the island's shore.
image credit: Jennifer Lavers and Alexander Bond
Jennifer Lavers of the University of Tasmania and Alexander Bond of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds carried out the landmark research project.
Sharing their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they said, "Here we document the amount of debris and rate of accumulation on Henderson Island, a remote, uninhabited island in the South Pacific. The density of debris was the highest reported anywhere in the world, up to 671.6 items per meter squared on the surface of the beaches." Yikes.
image credit: Jennifer Lavers and Alexander Bond
The island is very difficult to get to. To get there, Jennifer Lavers had to fly from Tasmania to Tahiti, catch a small, once-a-week plane to the Gambier Islands, join a freight ship that had already sailed for 10 days from New Zealand, and ask it to change course for Henderson. No ship travels there unless you specifically ask it to.
image credit: Jennifer Lavers and Alexander Bond
Finding hermit crabs in the trash is a common sight on the island, explains Dr Lavers. "The plastic is very old and brittle and toxic. To have wildlife living inside our waste, that's not something we want to continue.
image credit: Jennifer Lavers and Alexander Bond
Due to how remote and inaccessible the island is, a clean-up operation has never been carried out.
