Plastic now dwarfs every other kind of litter found on Australian shores and 80 percent of what the nation uses still ends up in landfill.
A federal parliamentary inquiry has heard confronting evidence about how the pollution crisis is affecting Australia’s oceans and waterways, and how efforts to understand and tackle the problem are failing.
“Our research has found that about three-quarters of the waste on Australian coastlines is plastic,” the CSIRO’s Peter Mayfield told the inquiry’s first hearing on March 31.
Even worse, the vast majority of the plastic measures just a few centimetres or smaller, meaning it’s more easily ingested by wildlife and more able to break down further and release the toxic chemicals used to make it….