This archive report was first published on 1 October 2019.
Located in the middle of the South Atlantic Ocean, Inaccessible Island is a rocky outcrop with sheer cliffs that rise from the sea. The island's shores are littered with plastic waste, but a recent study has revealed that most of it does not come from land-based activities.
According to a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on October 1, 2019, the plastic waste washing up on the island's shores is likely to have originated from Chinese merchant ships. The study's authors collected thousands of pieces of waste during visits to the island in 1984, 2009, and 2018.
The island is situated roughly midway between Argentina and South Africa in the South Atlantic gyre, a vast whirlpool of currents that has created an oceanic garbage patch. While initial inspections of the trash washing up on the island showed labels indicating it had come from South America, some 2,000 miles to the west, by 2018 three-quarters of the garbage appeared to originate from Asia, mostly China.
Many of the plastic bottles found on the island had been crushed with their tops screwed on tight, as is customary on board ships to save space. Report author Peter Ryan, director of the FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, noted that around 90 percent of the bottles found had been produced in the previous two years, ruling out the possibility that they had been carried by ocean currents over the vast distance from Asia.
Since the number of Asian fishing vessels has remained stable since the 1990s, while the number of Asian cargo vessels has vastly increased in the Atlantic, the researchers concluded that the bottles must come from merchant vessels, which toss them overboard rather than dumping them as trash at ports.
"It's inescapable that it's from ships, and it's not coming from land," Ryan told AFP. "A certain sector of the merchant fleet seems to be doing that, and it seems to be largely an Asian one," he said.
