NARRATION
In our throw away world a plastic bag outlives it's usefulness after around fifteen minutes. A plastic bottle might last a little longer, party balloons a whole occasion. But the ocean likes to hang onto these discarded treasures for decades, even centuries giving many other consumers a taste for plastic.

Dr Britta Denise Hardesty
Open it up and have a quick look.

NARRATION
This is a dead flesh footed shearwater. What you're about to see may make you feel sick to the stomach. But if you care about your own health and you like the odd bit of seafood this is essential viewing.

Dr Britta Denise Hardesty
Oh look at that.

Anja Taylor
Oh my God!

Man
Bloody hell! Oh you're kidding.

Dr Britta Denise Hardesty
I am not.

NARRATION
A hundred and seventy-five pieces of plastic, including bottle tops, balloon ties and a doll's arm.

Anja Taylor
These are all of the pieces of plastic taken from that bird's stomach three days ago. It represents about five to eight percent of the bird's body weight. That's the equivalent of me carrying around three to five kilograms of plastic in my stomach.

NARRATION
What makes this even more disturbing is where it's occurring, the beautiful and seemingly pristine Lord Howe Island. Sadly deaths like these are nothing new to local biologist, Ian Hutton.

Anja Taylor
So you have been documenting this for quite a while?

Ian Hutton
Yeah back about the year 2000 I started to notice there's little bits of plastic on the forest floor here and began searching and then I started to find skeletons of birds, chicks, look here's one over here in the forest. So this is the sort of thing that we do find here in ...

Anja Taylor
Oh my goodness.

Ian Hutton
... in May and June after the chicks have been either fledged or perished like this one. So that's a chick, we can see the down on it, so it is a chick.

Anja Taylor
So these are all of the bits of plastic that it's swallowed?

Ian Hutton
That's right.

Anja Taylor
Is this something that you find often?

Ian Hutton
Well walking through the forest I find carcass after carcass just like this.

NARRATION
These plastic delicacies are fed to shearwater chicks by their parents who mistake floating rubbish for fish.

Ian Hutton 
We have this year flushed the stomachs of about fifty chicks and each one of those did have some plastic, some large amounts.

NARRATION
Many chicks don't make it to adulthood. It's hardly a surprise that the local shearwaters are in rapid population decline. But this is not a story about a bird species in trouble, nor is it the story of some littering Lord Howe locals. What we're seeing here is a world problem so severe it's hard to fathom. 

Dr Britta Denise Hardesty
Our fishing nets are no longer made from hemp and from natural fibres. I mean we drive in plastic, we talk on plastic, we sit on plastic chairs. We, we package our food in it, you can go on an airplane now and there might be fifteen or twenty pieces of plastic just to get you from point A to point B.

NARRATION
It's estimated three point five million pieces of new plastic enter the world's oceans daily. Carried on global currents they accumulate in huge circulating gyres causing countless injuries to marine life along the way.

Dr Britta Denise Hardesty
It's a global issue. We're finding plastics in seabirds all around Australia. It's happening on our own shores and with our own breeding populations around here as well. Where's it coming from, what's the overall impact on wildlife, where's it going to? Understanding the sources and sinks of that marine debris is a really big question still. 

NARRATION
Denise is spear heading a nationwide study to tackle these questions. It's the first time marine debris has been assessed on such a huge scale.

Dr Britta Denise Hardesty
Yep that's perfect. So we're going to just walk up either side of the transect, we're going to look out either side about a metre from us, okay?

Anja Taylor
Okay.

NARRATION
On this deserted island beach plastic can be found within seconds.

Anja Taylor
There's a bit. There's a big bit.

Dr Britta Denise Hardesty
There's a big bit here. So I'm going to pick that piece up and I'm going to actually look at it on my size chart and I'm going to record how big that piece is there.

Anja Taylor
What is that?

Dr Britta Denise Hardesty
Oh that actually looks to me like the top of a, of a big jerry can.

Anja Taylor
Just big enough to fit around a bird's neck?

Dr Britta Denise Hardesty
Ah that's certainly correct.

NARRATION
The debris we're finding here is well travelled, sometimes covered in foreign species. Stowaways like these tiny barnacles may survive for thousands of kilometres and cause devastation to native species when they arrive.

Dr Britta Denise Hardesty
So as we go out on these beaches and we pick up rubbish on our shores, we say okay, 'This is the debris that's come here. We can then use oceanographic models that tell us, you know, what are the winds, what are the currents? These bits of garbage that ended up here where did they most likely come from?

NARRATION
There's thirty-five thousand kilometres of Australian coastline to cover. To fill in information gaps CSIRO is joining forces with Earth Watch and training up volunteers. 

Dr Britta Denise Hardesty
We're working with school groups, teachers, citizen scientists around the country, because we simply can't get all the information at every little beach along the way.I really think that by teaching kids that's where we're going to start to see that change.

NARRATION
So far the survey is more than three quarters of the way around the continent. Lord Howe Island is just one stop on the map.

Anja Taylor
It's an important survey point due to its location and its numerous species of nesting seabirds. This one's the Providence Petrel. And he's very friendly.

NARRATION
Over two hundred and seventy species worldwide are known to be affected by marine debris, including nearly half of all seabird species.

Dr Britta Denise Hardesty
Well our ultimate goal is to get a priority list to understand which of the species are more and less threatened by marine debris. And to do that we need to know you know where those birds are foraging for example. Where those turtles are foraging or how they feed, or the size of the birds and those sorts of things.

NARRATION
Like many people I've been aware for some time that plastic is not great for marine life. But it wasn't until I looked closely at the tide line of Ned's Beach that the penny really dropped.

Anja Taylor
There's lot of little tiny bits.

Dr Britta Denise Hardesty
This is getting into what they, what they call micro plastics right. And if you look here I bet we've got fifty or a hundred bits just in this little bit. So you can see where the waterline would have come up. Here's little bits ...

NARRATION
Plastics don't biodegrade but over many years in the sun and elements they break down into smaller and smaller pieces until they're so small they're hard to see.

Anja Taylor
Look on any beach in the tide line and you're likely to find hundreds of these tiny little pieces of plastic. It starts to give you an inkling of just how much must be out there. But the real problem with these harmless looking pieces is they can be ingested by animals right down at the bottom of the food chain - as far down as plankton - and that's where plastics come back to meet their maker.

NARRATION
Zoologist Doctor Dr Jennifer Lavers has spent the past five seasons working on the Lord Howe shearwater problem and has found the severe effects of micro plastics are happening at a molecular level.

Dr Jennifer Lavers 
They have what I call the invisible toxic effect. It, it's less easy to detect but equally as scary.
The plastic itself inherently contains a wide array of chemicals that are used during the manufacturing and processes. When the plastic is put out into the marine environment and it floats around in the ocean for let's say ten or forty years it really does last forever, it basically acts like a little magnet or a sponge and it takes all the contaminants that are out there in the ocean environment that are really diluted in the ocean water and it concentrates it up, onto the surface. 
Plastic itself has up to a thousand times a higher concentration of contaminants on its surface than the surrounding seawater from which it came. And when the animal, whether it's a turtle or a seabird takes that into their body those contaminants leach out into the blood stream and is incorporated into the tissues.

NARRATION
Jennifer Lavers collects and weighs plastic from dead birds and sends the feathers off for lab analysis. They reveal what contaminants are in the body.

Dr Jennifer Lavers 
The flesh footed shearwater on Lord Howe Island is officially the world's most heavily contaminated seabird. Just from mercury alone, the toxic threshold that's widely regarded around the world for birds is four point three parts per million. Anything above that four point three PPM is considered toxic to the birds. Well flesh footed shearwaters on Lord Howe Island are between one thousand and three thousand parts per million.

NARRATION
Asides from death, mercury can cause a wide array of effects from neurological damage to infertility. And mercury is just one of the many toxic contaminants found in and on plastic debris.

Dr Jennifer Lavers 
There is now a huge range of studies that are coming out almost every month that are showing marine species at the absolute base of the food chain are ingesting these plastics and these contaminants.
Anything really that comes out of the ocean you cannot certify that as organic any longer.

NARRATION 
Its estimated fish in the North Pacific now consume up to twenty-four thousand tonnes of plastic a year.
As one predator eats another contaminants biomagnify. This means the most vulnerable animal to the effects of toxic plastic contamination is the one at the very top of the food chain, us.

Dr Jennifer Lavers 
If you eat seafood in any fashion whatsoever the plastic pollution and corresponding contaminant problem has relevance to you.

NARRATION
Results from the marine debris study are yet to be analysed but major sources of debris are apparent.

Dr Britta Denise Hardesty
We do know from the rubbish that we find in the modelling that we're doing that are major population centres, that rubbish on those beaches is local. We're also seeing that say areas like Perth and WA that a lot of our rubbish is actually blowing offshore, which means that we may be delivering that to other places much further afield. If I can say, hey we know that where we've got those covers over the river mouth like we do in some of the major cities, we know that that really helps stop the rubbish from getting out there, then we can start to make management decisions at really relevant scales.

Anja Taylor
So does anybody get a gold star? Is anyone doing it right?

Dr Britta Denise Hardesty
Observationally we do not find full plastic bottles or cans or glass bottles in, in South Australia and I would likely attribute that to the, to the container deposit scheme that they have there. The waste that's associated with the beverage industry comprises about a third and some estimates are as high as a half of the marine debris that we find globally. So that's bottles and cans and straws and disposal coffee cups, bring your to go cup with you.

Dr Jennifer Lavers 
A lot of the solutions to the plastic problem are really simple and we can each and every one person can make a change and that it's not just governments that need to come in and enact sweeping changes. 

NARRATION
With each one of us contributing around sixty-seven kilograms of plastic waste a year, avoiding single use plastics can make an enormous difference to the environment and ultimately are own wellbeing.

Dr Jennifer Lavers 
Whether or not you interact with the ocean on a daily basis or you've been fortunate enough to see an albatross come into your life, you really need to kind of think twice about where your food is coming from and what role you and your surrounding community have played in the plastic pollution contaminant problem.