The beaches of Henderson Island, an uninhabited island in the South Pacific Ocean about 5,000 km away from the nearest population centre, are heavily littered with plastic waste. The beaches have an estimated 38 million plastic debris items weighing 17.6 tonnes.

The largest of the four islands of the Pitcairn Island group, Henderson Island is a Unesco World Heritage Listed site. Since it is uninhabited, its ecology is largely untouched by humans.

With 671 plastic items per sq metre on the surface of the beaches, the island has the highest density of plastic waste reported from anywhere in the world. And the amount of plastic waste on the island is ever growing with about 27 new plastic items per metre getting accumulated on a daily basis; in the North Beach of the Island alone, about 3,570 items get deposited daily. The results were published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In 2015, the researchers enumerated over 53,000 plastic items and arrived at an estimate of 37 million items littered on the beach. And alarmingly, even the 37 million plastic items may be an underestimation.  The reason: the team could not sample plastic waste buried below 10 cm from the surface and particles below 2 mm size and those found in the cliff areas and rocky coastline were not sampled.

With plastic waste disintegrating, smaller items were predominant, with microplastic accounting for 62% of items found in the Henderson Island.

The Henderson Island is located ion the western boundary of the South Pacific Gyre, a known plastic-accumulation zone for debris carried from South America (27%) or deposited by fishing boats.

“The plastic waste creates a physical barrier and contributes to a reduction in the number of sea turtles laying attempts, lower density of shoreline invertebrate communities and increased hazard of entanglement of coastal-nesting seabirds,” they write.

“Research has shown that more than 200 species are known to be at risk from eating plastic, and 55 per cent of the world’s seabirds, including two species found on Henderson Island, are at risk from marine debris,” Dr Jennifer Lavers from the University of Tasmania, Australia and the first author of the paper says in a release.

With the 17.6 tonnes of plastic waste found on the island accounting for only about 2 seconds of global production of plastic, the amount of waste that would get accumulated even in remote islands is bound to increases and further impact the exceptional natural beauty and biodiversity of these islands.