Plastic pollution: Birds all over the world are living in our rubbish

Image source, Simon Pierce

Birds from all over the world have been photographed in our trash.

People from all over the world submitted photos to the project.

The scientists running the project say they see birds entangled in everything from rope and fishing line to balloon ribbon and a flip-flops.

Birds are entangled in disposable face masks in nearly a quarter of the photos.

The aim of the project is to capture the impact of waste on the birds.

According to Dr Alex Bond from the Natural History Museum in London, if a bird builds a nest using long materials, like seaweed, branches or reeds, the chances are it will have human debris in its nest somewhere.

The project was started four years ago to draw attention to the problem of plastic waste.

He said that you will see it everywhere when you start looking for it. It's truly a global issue, because we had reports from all over the world.

The team looked into how many of the photos were submitted with personal protective equipment. Almost a quarter of the pictures submitted were of it.

Dr Bond said it was almost all masks. If you think of the different materials a surgical mask is made from, there's the elastic that we see around birds' legs or the hard piece of plastic that secures it over your nose.

"So we use this catch-all term of 'plastic' but it's a whole range of different materials and masks are a good example of that."

The researchers want to highlight a problem that leads to a lot of debris in the environment.

The breadth of the impact on species was devastating, according to Justine Ammendolia.

She said that the first bird hanging from a facemask in a tree was reported from Canada in April of 2020. It shows the harm that humans can do to the environment in a short period of time.

Changing to a bamboo toothbrush or a canvas shopping bag won't save the world because most large-scale plastic production today is commercial and industrial.

It's a combination of top-down policies and bottom-up pressure for us to say enough is enough.

For people to see these images for the first time is okay. We need to learn from the unseen suffering that some animals experienced during the Pandemic.

I hope people use their sadness to make a difference.

The Montreal Protocol that banned ozone-depleting chemicals is considered to be one of the most successful global agreements of all time.

We need the same thing with plastic pollution, and we are moving in that direction, but very, very slowly.

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