[Music]
Galápagos live from the ocean, Galapagos depends on the ocean.
If your heart doesn't broke when you see this,
in the Galápagos, I think nothing is going to motivate you.
Of all the plastic that enters the ocean, we can only see about 1% of it.
The other 99% is missing.
It entered the ocean and it hasn't been seen since.
When I was a little kid, I remember picking up the trash from the beach.
And you could feel that difference.
But now even though you try to clean every day,
it’s still coming from nowhere, you know?
One of the most remote locations on Earth,
the Galápagos Islands' nearest neighbour sits 1,000km across the Pacific Ocean.
The islands are not only beautiful
but home to a unique ecosystem with land animals, marine life
and plants that are found nowhere else on the planet.
This distinctive habitat inspired Charles Darwin's theory of evolution
and Galápagos remains one of the world's most biologically significant landmarks.
But despite its remoteness, even beaches here
are washed with litter as plastic waste from around the world arrives to its shores.
Away from Galápagos's picture-perfect beaches,
the landscape is arid and unwelcoming.
It's in these areas rarely visited by tourists
that the extent of plastic pollution can be seen.
I took a boat to Santiago Island with local marine biologist,
Juan Pablo Muñoz Perez.
Plastic waste from the ocean washes up
on this exposed coastline and
accumulates among the lava rock.
A lot of people would think, because the Galapagos is so remote,
compared to other places, that it would be really hard for plastic to end up here.
It’s a proof of exactly the opposite.
It’s a proof that everything is interconnected.
When Charles Darwin came here, probably he saw the same thing
that we're watching at the moment.
It was exactly the same.
The only difference is this, plastic.
I don't know when humans started to believe that something that is in plastic is safe
that something that is in plastic is OK.
What is the opposite.
Forget about that a plastic bottle like this is going to disappear in 1,000 years.
Forget about that, that's a lie.
This thing is going to disappear in 500 years, that’s a lie.
A bottle is going to disappear in ... that’s a lie.
A diaper is going to disappear in a million years … that’s a lie.
So where’s it gonna go?
Never it’s gonna disappear.
It’s gonna be in this planet for ever.
It just gets smaller and smaller and smaller.
You can see the blue dust in your hand
Exactly.
That is microplastic.
No one is going to pick up that bottle, it’s going to eventually end up like this,
Yeah.
And that’s the scary part.
How you gonna clean that?
It’s impossible. You can’t.
That actually is the one that we are eating, we are drinking,
we are breathing every day, everywhere in this planet.
97% of the Galápagos is off-limits to humans
but human rubbish from around the world still washes up on to the coast.
It arrives at such a rate that
it's almost impossible to keep the coastal areas clean.
Animals here are now living among piles of our rubbish,
mistaking it for food or becoming trapped in debris.
Scientist Ellie McKay
is in the Galápagos to map the plastic waste and measure the scale of the problem.
Her project forms part of a new strategy for Galápagos to become
the world's first plastic pollution-free place on Earth.
I grew up watching
documentaries about the Galápagos and
seeing all these incredible animals,
weird and wonderful creatures.
So when you actually come here and see it in real life,
it's really so astonishing,
spectacular.
It's everywhere.
The more you look, the more you see as well, right?
You see the big pieces first and then you start to notice that's actually,
plastic, on plastic, on plastic.
There’s a little family of hermit crabs having a nice time here.
That one’s sitting in a little plastic dish.
It’s a very different Galápagos from what you normally see, isn’t it?
This is one of the most common items
and if you think about it, every toothbrush that you’ve ever had
still exists somewhere on the planet.
So think about the first toothbrush you ever had as a toddler is probably out in the ocean somewhere.
When you talk about every toothbrush and all the wet wipes we might have used,
every bottle in your kitchen and bathroom …
When you start scaling that up and thinking how many people there are
doing the same, it's kind of scary and it
almost makes me feel kind of powerless.
It does, it's overwhelming and when I first started, I did find it very difficult
to come to terms with.
For the last year or so, we've been hearing all this sort of shocking, disgusting
guilt-tripping type stuff.
We need to change that story.
OK, we've got this problem, we've got more plastic than we ever imagined
and it's really bad? Yes.
But, there are solutions, there are things we could do about it.
So let's focus on that.
For me that's sort of the only way I can cope with it.
Elly's job involves using drone technology
to log and analyse plastic items that end up on beaches.
It's hoped that the Galápagos islands will be a testing ground for the fight against
plastic pollution around the world.
As you can probably hear, the drone is taking high-resolution photography of the beach,
significantly quicker than we could cover the beach ourselves
and look and count the plastic with our eyes.
And we take several hundred photographs,
overlapping that our algorithm will then stitch into an image back in the laboratory.
And especially on a beach like this,
trying to take photos of every square metre
when you can barely walk on this kind of rock.
It would be almost impossible, right?
So, it's not just knowing where the plastic is or how much there is.
The type of plastic really
affects what solution we choose.
To come up with the right solution,
the technology not only counts the plastic
but identifies what type of plastic it is.
Five tonnes of plastic on a beach,
if that is all fishing nets, then the solution is go to speak to the fishing industry.
If that five tonnes of plastic is a hygiene waste like wet wipes and toothbrushes,
then the solution might be to go and look at the local sewage waste facilities.
If five tonnes is food wrappers and bottles,
then the solution is to go talk to the packaging industry
and the consumer and try and get some alternatives.
Imagine a doctor trying to treat a patient with cancer,
if they're just told the patient has cancer,
there's very little that they can do.
What they need to know is which type of cancer is it,
where in the body is it located,
how quickly is it spreading …
So essentially, what we're doing is the same thing with our oceans.
If we can do the entire archipelago of the Galápagos,
we can prove that this works in the most hostile environment.
This technology helps to establish where plastic is ending up and what type of plastic it is.
To complete the cycle, scientists are working to establish
where in the world it came from in the first place.
Juan Pablo took me to the Galapagos Science Center
where they're trying to work out
who's responsible for the plastic waste.
One of the things that we did is going
to each location and put a clock for five minutes, one person,
and start collecting everything that you can see.
Are you saying this bag full of plastic was collected in five minutes?
Five minutes.
Some locations, had like three bags, four bags …
And the reason to collect these is to start to analyse a little
bit of tendencies, you know?
Because the main question is, where this garbage come from?
This was made in Callao, Peru.
OK.
This is Ecuador.
This is Peru as well.
And even China.
One important fact that we're looking from the data that we collect in
this five-minute coastal cleanup, is that most of the items that you can see,
microplastics, that you can see here in the Galapagos,
are basically bottles.
To take this analysis further, scientists have now come up with a way to show how
plastic travels across the ocean.
And once they know that, they can work out
the source of the problem.
Basically the software predicts how plastic behaves
against known oceanographic data.
So if you know what a bottle will do in the water
and you know what the water's doing,
you can combine them to work out where the bottle's going to go?
Exactly.
Because we don't know until now where it comes from,
we cannot prove now until when it comes, who's guilty
and what is the most effective solution.
And the most effective solution is to go and attack this problem from the source.
Because you can do amazing efforts on coastal cleanups,
and you can keep cleaning and keep cleaning …
But if you don't go to the source of the problem,
it's going to be just like an aspirin, it's going to be just like something like,
OK, we are going to heal you for a little bit
but then you are not actually killing the bug or killing the disease.
As scientists work to find the source of the problem
and volunteers keep cleaning the beaches,
plastic waste will continue to arrive in the Galápagos.
And it's the Island's unique wildlife and the local people who have to deal with the consequences.
For Juan Pablo and his friends,
it's got past the point that the Galápagos
can rely only on itself to solve this problem.
They are hopeful that change in other countries
will begin to reverse the damage being done.
The wind is always blowing from harbour to the ocean,
so we don't see the plastic that is in the ocean.
But as soon as the wind changes,
you can see, in the shore, a lot of plastic that's getting stuck.
It's hard to keep cleaning and not making any difference but if we try, you know?
Our lives are easier because of plastic, but next 10 years later are going to be really hard
for our sons, for everybody that's going to be here in this planet
because what we create today.
There's a lot of people trying to make a better world for the kids,
but I would say that could be also good to make better kids for our world, you know?
And then the education is a big key of making people change, maybe.
[Music]