Thank You for Not Littering

http://www.sxc.hu/index.phtml

Even the pristine hinterlands aren’t pristine anymore. In the early 1990s, British zoologist Tim Benton took a walk along a mile of shoreline on Ducie Island, a speck of land 4,970 miles east of Australia. Here’s what he found:

  • 268 unidentifiable pieces of plastic
  • 171 glass bottles
  • 74 bottle tops
  • 71 plastic bottles
  • 67 small buoys
  • 66 buoy fragments
  • 46 large buoys
  • 44 pieces of rope
  • 29 segments of plastic pipe
  • 25 shoes
  • 18 jars
  • 14 crates
  • 8 pieces of copper sheeting
  • 7 aerosol cans
  • 7 food and drink cans
  • 6 fluorescent tubes
  • 6 light bulbs
  • 4 jerry cans
  • 3 cigarette lighters
  • 2 pen tops
  • 2 dolls’ heads
  • 2 gloves (a pair)
  • 1 asthma inhaler
  • 1 construction worker’s hat
  • 1 football (punctured)
  • 1 glue syringe
  • 1 truck tire
  • 1 plastic coat hanger
  • 1 plastic foot mat
  • 1 plastic skittle
  • 1 small gas cylinder
  • 1 tea strainer
  • 1 tinned meat pie
  • 1 toy soldier

And “0.5 toy airplane.” That’s 953 items of debris altogether, on an island of 2.5 square miles, in the least populous country in the world.