It's estimated that 3500 new items wash up on Henderson Island each day. Credit:Iain McGregor/Stuff

Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size Stolen from Talley’s". The accusatory stamp on a washed-up fishing crate doesn't tell the full story. It's more likely the pale-blue plastic tub was flung from a vessel far out to sea. Four Talley's tubs were found washed above the high-tide mark on Henderson Island, more than 5600 kilometres from the New Zealand company's wharves. Another, from Christchurch-based supplier United Fisheries, warns: "unauthorised users will be prosecuted". On the uninhabited Henderson Island, the tub’s only users will be the beach's hermit crabs. Often they climb into the hundreds of plastic containers littering the beach, looking to make a home. But they can't get back out and starve to death in the hot sun. Hermit crabs shelter in plastic washed up on Henderson Island. Credit:Iain McGregor/Stuff A baby turtle in a plastic container that washed up on the beach. Credit:Iain McGregor/Stuff The decaying stench attracts other crabs, who also perish. One pesticide container upturned on the beach held the corpses of 500 creatures.


About 3500 new items wash up each day Henderson Island, a speck of land deep in the southern Pacific Ocean, is part of the Pitcairn Island chain, and a day’s sea crossing from the nearest civilisation. Thirty years ago it was designated a Unesco World Heritage site, one of the best remaining examples of an elevated coral atoll ecosystem. As well as an important site for breeding seabirds, the island is home to four endemic land birds: a fruit dove, lorikeet, reed warbler and the plucky flightless crake. In 2012, filmmaker Jon Slayer visited the island as part of an expedition to support efforts to create an enormous marine sanctuary in the island group. The images he captured - of fishing nets and buoys, plastic water bottles, helmets, and crates scattered over more than two kilometres of beach - were uploaded to Google Earth. An analysis, published in 2017, estimated 18 tonnes of plastic lay on the faraway shores. The island was said to have "the highest density of plastic debris" recorded anywhere, with 3500 new items washing up each day. Seabirds nest in new rubbish on the island. Credit:Iain McGregor/Stuff


In June this year, Slayer, and the study's Canadian authors Jennifer Lavers and Alexander Bond, of the Adrift Lab, returned to the island with a dedicated team of volunteers. Henderson Island lies in the world's third-largest marine protected area - an 830,000 square kilometre "no-take zone". Fishing, aside from some traditional, and non-commercial catch, is illegal, as is seafloor mining. Yet of the six tonnes of garbage collected on a June science and conservation expedition, an estimated 60 per cent appeared to be associated with industrial fishing. A crab walks past a fish aggregation device that has washed up on Henderson Island. Credit:Iain McGregor/Stuff Fishing buoys totalled around 40 per cent of the weight, and rope and nets made up 20 per cent. Around a dozen fish aggregation devices (FADs) were found washed up on the island’s East Beach, some coming to shore as the clean-up team worked. They are rudimentary rafts with netting that drifts as deep as 100 metres below the surface. A satellite-linked buoy then relays the location to a fishing vessel. Since fishing is banned in the waters around the Pitcairn Island group, New Zealand police and the British government are now investigating the debris.


Islanders are powerless to stop wave after wave of junk The Pitcairn Islanders are people of the ocean, most descended from eight mutineers and their Tahitian companions. They established a settlement at Adamstown in 1790 after Fletcher Christian rebelled against the Bounty’s captain William Bligh, and set him adrift. The 4.4 square kilometre Pitcairn Island rises vertically out of the ocean, battered by violent Pacific waves. Three other islands in the chain - Henderson, Ducie and Oeno - are uninhabited. All are administered by Britain. In 2012, the Pitcairn Council voted to create a marine sanctuary, to protect what are some of the cleanest waters in the world. With the help of Pew Charitable Trusts, they secured the support of the UK government for the measure. The islands now provide a protected habitat for at least 1249 species of marine mammals, fish and seabirds. But the islanders are powerless to stop wave after wave of plastic junk washing onto Henderson’s shores. Loading Replay Replay video Play video Play video The rubbish is carried there on the powerful South Pacific Gyre. The island lies almost at the centre of the Gyre, a giant current which moves anti-clockwise across the ocean. It’s one of five confluences of currents that concentrate floating plastic. The North Pacific Gyre, between California and Japan, holds the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, drifting over an area three times the size of France.


It’s believed that most of the plastic that ends up on Henderson Island is from South America or lost from passing ships. But the clean-up team on the island in June found items from all corners of the globe. Spirits bottled in Japan, Scotland and Puerto Rico; a rubber boot manufactured in the Netherlands; and a hard hat from a building yard in the United States. Everyday household items covered the beach: laundry baskets, toilet seats, razors, toothbrushes and dozens of shoelaces. Recycling expert James Beard picks up rubbish along the beach. Credit:Iain McGregor/Stuff Expedition leader Robin Shackell is Pitcairn’s deputy governor, based at the British High Commission in Auckland. "Pitcairn can't clear this up," he says. "They are 50 people who live 120 miles away [from Henderson] … They live tough, hard lives themselves." Islander Jay Warren has visited Henderson many times, including in March, preparing for the expedition. "People just keep chucking rubbish into the sea and they don't know where it is going to end up. Unfortunately, it is on our beach at Henderson." Pitcairn Islander Jay Warren is dwarfed by an enormous pile of fishing buoys, collected along the beach. Credit:Iain McGregor/Stuff


A plan for the future The expedition followed strict scientific methods - weighing and counting on alternative days, meticulously recording data so it can later be sifted through and analysed by scientists. One day, on a 600 metre stretch of beach, the team counted 909 bottle tops. The separation of the caps bothered recycling expert James Beard. What happened to the rest of the bottle? "My guess at this point is that the PET [polyethylene terephthalate] is heavier than the plastic lids … and they sink. "So, for every bottle top we are finding there is a bottle somewhere out in the ocean that has sunk to the bottom." Beard works for Valpak, a UK company which helps businesses reduce waste, and was heavily involved in planning the expedition. But he wasn’t prepared for what they found. Marine conservationist Johnny Briggs finds a plastic drinking mug in the sand. Credit:Iain McGregor/Stuff "When you walk through it you notice things that you don't notice on the photographs, which is the hundreds and thousands of tiny little bits of plastic. It is quite overwhelming when you are actually in some of those highly contaminated areas." As well as being unsightly, the litter can be deadly to wildlife. Trinkets and single-use plastics are often found in the stomachs of dead sea birds and whales. Other marine creatures - such as sharks, turtles and dolphins - become ensnared, disfigured and sometimes drown. Plastics break down and end up as microplastics, defined as less than 5mm in diameter, and nanoplastics (less than 0.001 mm). These are ingested by tiny organisms like plankton, sending the particles up through the food chain. Although the crew removed all visible junk, the bulk of the pollution was left disintegrating into the shoreline, with an estimated 2000 tiny items per square metre. Johnny Briggs, Brett Howell, James Beard and Robin Shackell. Credit:Iain McGregor/Stuff On the expedition, scientists Alex Bond and Jennifer Lavers measured soil temperature, moisture and other properties from five sites. Oceanographer Simeon Archer-Rand, from Britain’s Centre for Environment Fisheries and Aquaculture Science, spent hours bobbing about on an inflatable raft searching for seabed litter. His camera captured 4000 images over 35 locations, and half-a-day’s worth of video footage. It will be scoured for pieces of junk to help understand how it moves on the tides around the island and how it is affecting marine life. He also took samples from 24 spots on East Beach and back in his lab will coat the minuscule plastic particles - some as thin as a human hair - with a red stain that will make them visible under ultraviolet light, to allow for counting and sorting. Divers Luke Hosty and Jon Slayer captured underwater footage of the island’s stunning coral reefs. Credit:Iain McGregor/Stuff But his research was not limited to plastic analysis. The images will also be used to create habitat maps and models which will then be given to the Pitcairn Islanders so they can best decide how to manage the marine environment and protect the seabed habitats. 'A wake-up call' Weather and swell patterns didn’t improve over the course of the expedition, and so the clean-up team was forced to leave the collected rubbish on the beach, neatly mustered. It now sits in 13 collection stations, dragged over the high-tide mark and piled up in beach scrub. The expedition team dragged collected rubbish above the tide line. Credit:Iain McGregor/Stuff Another 14 large pieces of plastic were deliberately left on the beach, so that four digital cameras can track what happens to them. It’s expected the same volumes of plastic will wash up on the beach within five years. According to Britain’s Royal Statistical Society, an estimated 8 million tonnes of plastic ends up in our oceans each year. By 2050, we will be producing four times as much plastic as we are now. And on current trends, 40 per cent of that will be used only once. Shackell and beach clean-up leader, conservationist Brett Howell, are now looking at options to move the rest of the rubbish. The 1200 fishing buoys collected from the beach will be taken to Pitcairn Island and sliced in two, to use for hydroponic agriculture. Ultimately, the goal is to deliver the rest of the plastic to Costa Rica where it can be transformed into low-cost housing. Conservationist Brett Howell drags a sackful of plastic into one the island’s limestone caves. Credit:Iain McGregor/Stuff Howell has worked tirelessly to find a solution since he returned to the United States. "If this isn't a wake-up call that we need to change our global supply chains, get to a circular economy, I don't know what is," he says. Beard is not despondent about leaving the trash behind. "It is part of the story of the actual problem. If you can't physically take the plastic out of these places where it has accumulated then I think it speaks volumes for the actual scale of the problem that the world is facing. "One thing, that's kind of brought home to me, is that we don't need a few people doing everything perfectly, we just need a lot of people doing a few changes here and there which will make a real impact." Stuff.co.nz