I remember walking the Kiritimati backcountry a few years back and being shocked at the amount of plastic debris. Turns out even one of the remotest places on earth is not immune from the scourge of plastic.
Henderson Island is about the most remote place you can visit without leaving the planet. It sits squarely in the middle of the South Pacific, 3,500 miles from New Zealand in one direction and another 3,500 miles from South America in the other.
Henderson should be pristine. It is uninhabited. Tourists don’t go there. There’s no one around to drop any litter. The whole place was declared a World Heritage Site by the United Nations in 1988. The nearest settlement is 71 miles away and has just 40 people on it. And yet, seafaring plastic has turned it into yet another of humanity’s scrapheaps.
LINK (via: The Atlantic)
