Lord Howe Island: Sentinel for the Global Plastic Pollution Crisis

Lord Howe Islanders are as careful with rubbish as anywhere I’ve seen. Every item is managed, every visitor briefed, every biosecurity step taken. But still, plastics are here. They arrive with the tides. On beaches that look pristine from a distance, the tide lines at your feet have microplastics like these. The problem isn’t the island. It’s global. The world’s oceans are filled with our waste. Once plastic breaks down into micro- and nano-plastics, you can’t “clean” a beach without removing the beach itself. The fragments are sand-sized and resuspend with every tide. Prevention upstream is the only real fix.

Seabirds tell the truth first. For years, researchers and conservationists like Ian Hutton have opened the stomachs of dead shearwaters and found plastic caps, soy-sauce fish and shards of broken plastics crammed where food should be. Some birds are so loaded with plastic they literally crunch when handled. Studies on Lord Howe log plastic ingestion rates of 80% to 90% for shearwater chicks. Some chicks die from internal injuries; others carry a load that quietly saps their health because they can’t ingest and digest enough food.

If plastics are reaching and harming a place as remote and well-managed as Lord Howe, then they’re everywhere. The fix is bigger than beach clean-ups (though those matter). It’s about stopping the flow upstream. That means ending single-use plastics, holding producers responsible, redesigning packaging and supply chains, and putting the environment first in every decision.

Meanwhile, we must keep telling the truth from places like Lord Howe. Because truth changes policy when enough people hear it. Plastics are here. They’re everywhere. But so are the people who can fix it. On Lord Howe, the birds are asking us to hurry.

Next up: Weeding and planting for hope - how the Friends of Lord Howe are helping.