KHNL NBC Channel 8, Honolulu, HI 11.09.07

A beach that was once a place where Native Hawaiians used to come to find logs for their voyaging canoes, is now a place where tons of trash wind up every year.

Link: Big Island Beach Attracts Plastic Trash

Cohasset Mariner

...in the Pacific Ocean there is an area the approximate size of Texas that is a nearly solid mass — an island -- of plastic bag debris. I tried to visualize this. It seemed so absurd that I started to doubt the facts of the article. I did my own research and found out that, sadly, this is all true. In fact there is an organization, the Algalita Marine Research Foundation, whose work has shown that this plastic island has 1,000,000 times more toxins than surrounding seawaters, and six times as much plastic per weight of water than zooplankton. And their most recent expedition uncovered that the acreage of this area is expanding rapidly...

Link: COLUMN: It’s time to stop using plastic bags.

Greenpeace

The very thing that makes plastic items useful to consumers, their durability and stability, also makes them a problem in marine environments. Around 100 million tonnes of plastic are produced each year of which about 10 percent ends up in the sea. About 20 percent of this is from ships and platforms, the rest from land.

Link: The trash vortex.

The Scottsman

THE number of plastic bags littering Scotland's beaches - potentially lethal to wildlife - increased by 41 per cent last year, against a national increase of 17 per cent.

Thousands of Marine Conservation Society (MCS) volunteers on a check-and-clean exercise last September also found 66 cigarette stubs for every kilometre of Scottish beach, a 273 per cent increase on the year. They were among the 330,000 items found on more than 170km of Britain's coastline by 3,980 volunteers - on average a plastic bag, lollipop stick, cigarette butt, cotton bud, fish box or burger carton every half-metre.

That total was a modest 4 per cent increase on the year. But in a decade, the count has almost doubled...

Link: Sand, sea and a rising tide of lethal litter.

Suffolk & Essex online

A RISING tide of plastic bags is littering East Anglia's beaches and endangering wildlife, according to a report published today.

The report, by the Marine Conservation Society, is based on surveys carried out in September last year and suggests that more litter was dropped on the region's beaches than in 2004.

Andrea Crump, the society's litter projects co-ordinator, said: “It is disappointing but the situation in East Anglia and the rest of the South-East of England is considerably better than the South-West where much more litter is dropped.”

East Anglia is included in the regional results for the South East which show that an average of 1,847 items of litter were found along every kilometre of the 87 beaches surveyed.

Link: Littering of beaches endangers wildlife.

BBC News

Litter on Welsh beaches reached a record high in 2004, according to a major seaside cleanliness survey. Wales had the highest density of beach litter recorded in the Marine Conservation Society's Beachwatch initiative. The society has been monitoring beaches for 14 years. It said litter had more than doubled in UK in the past decade. It is campaigning for new laws to control the growth in beach pollution, particularly discarded plastic…

Bags and small plastic pieces can entangle marine animals causing them to drown. They can also be swallowed by marine animals like whales and turtles, causing them to starve….

The society has called on the UK Government to introduce new laws placing a tax on plastic bags…

Link: Welsh beaches are most littered.

Scotsman.com

WILDLIFE in the North Sea is increasingly falling victim to human waste, with virtually all dead sea-birds found to have eaten litter carried in the water, according to a new study.

Scientists measuring the amount of waste found in fulmars discovered that 96 per cent of the birds had fragments of plastic in their stomachs.

The figure was almost double the amount discovered in the early 1980s, the researchers said. Environmental groups - which are backing an MSP’s bid to introduce a levy on plastic bags in shops in Scotland - branded the figures "truly shocking".

Link: Sea-bird death toll leads to call for tax on plastic bags.