Close to a million plastic shoes, mainly flip flops are among the torrent of debris washed up on an “unspoilt paradise” in the Indian Ocean. Scientists estimated that the beaches of Australia’s Cocos (Keeling) Islands are strewn with around 414 million pieces of plastic pollution. They believe some 93% of it lies buried under the sand, say the researchers. Nearly half the plastic manufactured since the product was developed six decades ago has been made in the past 13 years, say scientists. They calculated that the islands are littered with 238 tonnes of plastic, including 977,000 shoes and 373,000 toothbrushes. These were among the identifiable elements in an estimated 414 million pieces of debris.
An estimated 12.7 million tonnes of plastic entered our oceans in 2010 alone, with around 40 per cent of plastics entering the waste stream in the same year they’re produced. As a result of the growth in single-use consumer plastics, it’s estimated there are now 5.25 trillion pieces of ocean plastic debris.
— source imas.utas.edu.au , bbc.com | 16 May 2019