The tiny Lord Howe Island is a sanctuary of volcanic rock off Australia’s east coast, so carefully preserved that the number of visitors allowed at any time is strictly controlled.
It’s home to about 500 humans and 44,000 shearwaters, more commonly known as mutton birds.
It is the last place you would expect to find wildlife with bellies full of plastic.
For about 18 years, Dr Jen Lavers has been travelling to Lord Howe Island to study the mutton birds, and every time finds more and more plastic inside them.
Last month, her team Adrift Lab found a bird that broke the record: almost a fifth of its entire body weight was plastic.
“To witness it first-hand, it is incredibly visceral. There is now so much plastic inside the birds you can feel it on the outside of the animal when it is still alive. As you press on its belly … you hear the pieces grinding against each other.
The mutton birds have become so full of plastic their bellies crunch and crackle with the sound of it.
It is a graphic sound, but one that the Lord Howe Island scientists want the world to hear.
A picture of anger and shame
Dr Lavers has been seeking to raise the plight of the mutton bird, saying it is a canary in the coal mine for the world’s larger plastic problem.And so, as Australian politicians campaigned in a federal election, she enlisted the help of long-time friend and Greens senator Peter Whish-Wilson, asking him to join her and see for himself the state of the mutton birds on Lord Howe Island.
Arriving to the island for the first time, Whish-Wilson said the mountainous landscape rising out of the fog was like something from Gilligan’s Island.
“It’s not really the kind of place you come to be shocked, and walk away feeling a little bit traumatised.”
That night, he joined researchers to visit the mutton birds at their rookery, a collection of nests dug into the sand at the beach.
He said the innocent birds were so unafraid of humans they would see the light of his head torch and run into his lap.
“They’re all running around, bumping into you, knocking things over. It’s kind of mayhem.”
There at the beach he helped the team to ‘lavage’ the birds — that is, he helped to feed a tube down their throats to flush them with water.
Then he watched the stomach contents spill into a tray: a syringe cap, a cigarette butt, a screw cap from a piece of furniture, and larger bits of plastic that were harder to dislodge.
“The tub was full,” he said.
“It was horrible to see. It was very sad. I felt a real range of emotions, from anger and sadness through to shame, and I don’t know, just frustration.”
The next day, the team dissected birds that had been found dead on the beach, and what was inside was worse.
Since Dr Lavers’s first visit in 2008, she has witnessed an increase from about three quarters of birds carrying about five to 10 pieces of plastic, to every single bird having 50 or more pieces.
Until last month, the most they had ever found was 403 pieces in 2024.
“I’m sad to say just yesterday we blew [the record] out of the water, and our new record holder is 778 pieces of plastic in an 80-day-old seabird chick, in one of the most pristine corners of our planet.”
Arranged on a sheet, the mosaic of plastic could be mistaken for a piece of art.
Dr Lavers says what is happening to the mutton birds is happening everywhere.
Plastics and microplastics are being found in everything, oceans, food, even in humans, and the migratory shearwater is a ‘sentinel species’ for a bigger problem.
“These birds have a very important story to tell, and what they are telling us is that their populations are in decline, that the amount of plastic they’re consuming is going up and up,” she said.
Whish-Wilson says what he witnessed moved him.
“What’s been seen can’t be unseen. I wish every politician and every decision maker in parliaments around the world, because this is a global problem, I wish they could all experience what I experienced just for 24 hours, to come down here and do it themselves, and then they’ll get it,” he said.
“We are not winning the war on waste.”
Plastic recycling has not improved
The most recent waste data for Australia shows that the average Australian generated about 512 kilograms of waste in a year — about 50 kilograms of that being plastic waste.Australia is producing more plastic waste per capita than in 2017, when a baseline measurement was taken.
That year, about 12.5 per cent of plastic was recycled, with the rest sent to landfill.
The most recent data, five years on, shows plastic recycling rates have not improved at all.
The responsible industry group admitted last year its target for 70 per cent of plastics to be recycled by 2025 “clearly” would not be met.
The recycling sector says the problem is simple: there are simply not enough companies buying enough recycled products.
“The major missing piece is demand. We’re really good at collecting and sorting, we can process in Australia, but what we are not doing in Australia is buying it back,” Waste Management and Resource Recovery chief executive Gayle Sloan says.
But there is an idea being floated in parliament to make packaging producers more responsible for their products.
The United Kingdom has introduced world-leading laws that require at least 30 per cent of plastic products to be made from recycled materials.
For every kilogram of “non-compliant” plastic that does not reach that 30 per cent threshold, producers suffer a financial penalty.
Whish-Wilson has found an uncommon ally across the chamber in Nationals senator Ross Cadell, who last month both handed down a report calling on Australia to legislate a Circular Economy Act, and force producers to use more recycled products and take responsibility for its entire life cycle.
“I think the reason we’re losing is because the only focus we’ve had on circularity, or, you know, recycling or waste reduction, whatever you want to call it, has been on the end of the pipe, on the businesses that actually have to clean up the mess.”
A Labor-led inquiry into waste, established by the recently replaced environment minister, has also recommended considering a 30 per cent recycled content target with “incentives or mandates” on local plastic manufacturers to reach it.
Newly installed Environment Minister Murray Watt told the ABC the government was committed to “new rules to produce less waste in the first place”.
“This includes consideration of mandatory requirements for recycled content in packaging,” Watt said.
“Our reform will also include enforcement measures to make sure companies adhere to our strong regulations.”
With a new term of parliament, a new environment minister and the final round of global negotiations on a treaty to end plastic pollution, Whish-Wilson hopes that momentum is building.
“It’s a really big issue in people’s minds. Now, like globally, there’s a push to get this high-ambition treaty. You know, [former prime minister] Scott Morrison even flew to to New York to raise plastic pollution as an issue at the United Nations,” he said.
“My experience in politics is things take a long time to change, but when they do, they can happen really quickly. And I feel like we are on the cusp of that.”
On the cusp of change
In March 2022, United Nations members endorsed a resolution to end plastic pollution, and agreed to forge a legally binding agreement by the end of 2024.That deadline passed without a deal.
But a final session of negotiations is due to be held in August in Geneva.
Former environment minister Tanya Plibersek warned that UN assembly last year that plastic production was set to triple by 2060, “and experts predict plastics in oceans could outweigh fish by 2050 — making this treaty critical”.
A review of Australia’s last major reforms to the waste sector, introduced under former prime minister Scott Morrison, is due in weeks.
Whish-Wilson says it is time for Australia to turn its eye on the “front end” of the waste pipe, where the plastic gets made, not where it gets spat out.
“The big problem, it’s actually quite simple how to solve this. All government policies all around the world, including here in Australia, have been targeted at the end of the waste pipe. When the waste comes out we try and recycle it, we try and recover resources from it, or we send it off to landfill, or it ends up in our environment.
“What we need to do is focus on the front of the pipe, the producers of this plastic. Packaging is the biggest cause of plastic pollution on the planet, and in the ocean, and I saw it in the stomach of all these poor seabirds.
“Everyone out there hates plastic pollution. They hate seeing it on the beaches. They hate the idea of it being in our bodies. They hate it being in their food and in their seafood. It doesn’t matter what political colour you are, most people don’t want to see this issue, so they want to see politicians solve it.”
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