Plastic is Invading Our Green Spaces as Well as Our Blue Planet

We all know about the devastating effects plastic is having on our oceans, it’s hard not to amongst all the news stories, TV documentaries and new sustainable products filling shelves. Yet have you thought about the impacts of plastic on land? We know that landfills are reaching capacity, almost bursting at the seams and, in some countries, they already have, sending waste tumbling down mountainsides, city streets and inland streams. When we picture plastic on land our minds always seem to imagine it invading human lives but let’s not forget about all the terrestrial animals which are also suffering from our single use mayhem.

80% of ocean plastic is derived from land-based sources but what about all the pieces of plastic which don’t even make it to the sea, instead remaining tangled in hedgerows or rolling like tumbleweed across our abandoned city wastelands. 400 million tons of plastic are produced per year, much of this being turned into only short-lived items and a mighty one third of this plastic waste ends up in soils and freshwater. All this time we have been focussing so intently on the consequences to our oceans when we have been missing the millions of tonnes of plastic pollution right under our noses! Even scientists have failed to pay great attention to plastic pollution on land and so we may be severely underestimating the threat to our furry countryside critters.

A significant amount of our waste originates from food packaging; we all know it’s almost impossible to do a weekly shop at a supermarket without dragging home various plastic films, packets and pots and that’s not even thinking about how difficult it is to get a takeaway anything without some kind of unrecyclable casing. So because our rubbish smells of our delicious leftovers, cheeky scavengers such as racoons and foxes often explore our discarded items in the search for an evening snack but in the process, they often get their noses or even whole heads stuck in pieces of rubbish which leaves them unable to feed properly in the future. Sadly, it can also lead to dehydration or suffocation. It’s not just noses at risk of getting stuck either, animals have been found with cans stuck on their paws which leaves them unable to flee from predators, or in our city environments, unable to escape the modern day hunters that are moving cars and buses. Racoons have often been found with beer six pack rings stuck around their bodies and as the racoons grow, the plastic digs tighter into their skin causing painful cuts. This problem is made even worse by the fact that many people fly tip in areas which form the boundary between rural and urban areas or on patches of unprotected wild land, coincidentally where some of the highest levels of biodiversity often are.

For birds the impacts may be even more detrimental if pieces of wire, twine or film become wrapped around their wings. If a bird cannot fly, it cannot escape to the safety of the treetops, hunt for food or keep up with its flock as they head off on migration for more abundant food sources. Imagine being left behind alone in an area where the temperatures are plummeting and food is disappearing. As pieces of farming twine and thin fishing line become more common amongst our mosses, branches and grasses, birds also accidentally use our waste to create a cosy nest for their young which can then leave the poor baby’s feet and wings entangled in its own home. Our increasing problem of beached unwanted fishing gear is also impacting deer whose antlers provide the perfect opportunity to become entangled in our trash. In Scotland, a deer was seen with a massive heavy bundle of rope wrapped around its antlers, complete with a bright pink fishing buoy. Male deer often fight with their antlers but once hindered by heavy rope, they have less chance of winning or even in some cases, the two sets of antlers may become irreversibly entwined, leaving two deer unable to feed, drink or move properly.

Many other impacts of plastic remain the same on land and at sea. Ingested microplastics can still pass on harmful toxins which wreak havoc on the body’s ability to function while ingestion of larger plastic bags for example, has caused intestinal blockages in agricultural cows whose fields have been littered with plastic film from silage bales or feed sacks. Plastic further impacts our agriculture by integrating itself into our soil in which we grow a substantial amount of food. For example, 80% of microplastics, mostly microfibres, that are contained within sewage are not filtered out at water treatment plants due to their tiny size. These microfibres derive from the washing of our synthetic clothes with only one washing machine cycle sending 700,000 microfibres spinning into our air. From here they can land undetected on our soil or in freshwater systems such as lakes from which humans and animals gain their drinking water. The rest of the microfibres may end up in our sewage and once treated, this is often used as an effective fertiliser on soil, allowing plastic to easily infiltrate the earth. Some of the microplastics still carry chemicals which were added to the virgin plastic when it was first being manufactured and these are able to leach out into our soil causing pollution. Ironically these chemicals are added to plastic to make it more durable, despite much of our plastic forming single use items. Earthworms can even detect the presence of plastic in the ground which subsequently causes their burrowing habits to change. This then alters the level of air getting into the soil which impacts the ability of plants, grasses and flowers to grow which all form the very basis of our essential food chain. So these tiny microfibres, which we can’t even see, could be altering entire ecosystems if we allow them to become increasingly persistent!

All this sounds very disheartening, it sounds like we have now doubled the extent of our plastic problem which means we have to double our efforts to stem its flow into our green spaces. However, the same solutions still apply and you should still search for sustainable alternatives for everyday plastic products. For urban dwellers, you can also push for more public water refill stations to reduce plastic bottle use and purchase some reusable ultra-thick bin-bags which even our most peckish scavengers can’t rifle through. If you live in a rural area or a city and are always grumbling about how you can’t carry out a beach clean and make a real difference to our beautiful wildlife, then now is your chance. Our rivers, ponds, forests, mountains and more all need cleaning to rid them of our plastic blight, particularly rivers which greedily transport our waste to the sea. You can also lead city street cleans and use the Litterati app to identify hotspots. This app allows you to take photos of rubbish hotspots in your urban area and tag them with the GPS location so other eager street cleaners can find them to help tackle one source of this pervasive problem. This was used so effectively in the Netherlands to showcase areas of outrageous rubbish dumping that one McDonalds store actually agreed to clean up the community area surrounding its restaurant to reduce the takeaway boxes people were dumping in nearby verges and hedgerows. In Montana, the Litterati app has been used to photograph thousands of littered cigarette butts in urban parks to push for legislation which introduces tobacco free parks. It is so simple for each of us to do this and if we all do it, the amount of data we can collect on plastic pollution is astonishing and far outnumbers the information our limited number of scientists can gather. This data is often then fed into scientific reports which underpin our legislative decisions, meaning you could make a real difference and change the course of our precious environment’s future.

By Neve McCracken-Heywood