A new study reveals the accumulation of rubbish in European waters: plastic, cans, glass, fishing gear and so on. It’s all there

Ever since I learned of the vast quantities of plastic that have found their way to Midway Atoll in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, I cannot pass a piece of litter without stooping to pick it up. On a bad morning, this can mean that I arrive at my sons’ school carrying an empty packet of pork scratchings and a dripping can of lager. This is not a good look.

A new study of the sea floor in European waters has only hardened my rubbish-collecting resolve. This distant submarine world, which most people (I imagine) assume to be untouched, is littered with trash.

The paper brings together photographic evidence from stills and videos of the sea floor at 32 sites in European waters at depths ranging from 35 to 4,500 metres. At all of these spots, humans have made their mark. An image in the paper reveals a can of Heineken in the upper Whittard Canyon south of Ireland and a packet of Uncle Benn’s Express Rice on Darwin Mounds to the north of Scotland. There is plenty of plastic, fishing lines, nets, bottles and masses of clinker (the residue of burnt coal dumped from steam ships), report researchers in PLoS ONE.

The most litter-strewn of the sites under investigation is Lisbon Canyon just off the Portuguese coast, where there are more than 60 items of rubbish per hectare. The range of litter densities is roughly the same as has been recorded in smaller surveys in other regions around the world. But this study – the most comprehensive to date – clarifies the extent of the problem.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Gets to the parts other beers cannot reach. A can of Heineken in the upper Whittard Canyon. Photograph: PLoS ONE

The beer can reminds me of a paper from 1977, which provided a first glimpse of “a remarkable community of large and abundant benthic organisms” around an active hydrothermal vent at the Galapagos Rift. The discovery of animal life at such great depths and under such great pressure came as a great surprise. Equally surprising (to me at least) was a photograph, taken at a depth of almost 2,500 metres, in which it's possible to make out a cluster of very large bivalves and, just metres away, a beer can.

“Most of the deep sea remains unexplored by humans, and these are our first visits to many of these sites,” says Kerry Howell, one of the authors on the PLoS ONE paper. “But we were shocked to find that our rubbish has got there before us.”

I am too. A plastic bag or beer can on a London street might be a long way from the sea. But with these haunting submarine images in mind, I find it hard to pass on by and leave this litter where it lies.

Pham CK, Ramirez-Llodra E, Alt CHS, Amaro T, Bergmann M, et al (2014) Marine Litter Distribution and Density in European Seas, from the Shelves to Deep Basins. PLoS ONE 9(4): e95839. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0095839

You can read more about Midway Atoll in An Iceberg As Big As Manhattan by the BBC's science editor David Shukman

