When it comes to plastic, recycling isn’t working. So, it’s time for us to completely rethink what we do with our rubbish
VICTORIA GILL Victoria is BBC News’s award-winning science correspondent. Her reporting can be found on television, radio and online.
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I was recently stopped in my tracks by what I’d describe as a ‘cutely apocalyptic’ photograph. It’s the one you see on the left, of a small, beady-eyed hermit crab tucked neatly into a bright red object. This ‘shell’ provides the little crustacean with a perfectly proportioned, easily manoeuvrable piece of armour. Only it’s not a shell in the conventional sense, it’s a discarded plastic bottle top.
The image is a moving depiction of the extent of the global issue of plastic pollution. Ordinarily, hermit crabs scavenge items from the seabed to use for a shelter. It’s due to this behaviour of finding a home and carrying it around on their backs that they earned their name. But now, many of them are picking up bits of rubbish rather than the beautiful snail shells they normally nestle into.
This alarming discovery was made by a group of Polish researchers, based at the universities of Warsaw and Poznań, by carrying out what they term an ‘internet ecology study’. The team scoured social media for pictures of hermit crabs adorned with human trash. And they found a lot of them – a total of 386 pictures from every tropical coast around the world.
Some of the crabs had metal bottle caps on their backs and at least one was seen wearing the end of a broken light bulb, but 85 per cent of them had made their homes in pieces of discarded plastic.
According to a 2021 report by the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), in just 65 years, plastic production has increased by 18,300 per cent – fuelled by our relentless ‘convenience lifestyle’. We’re now, says the EIA, producing more plastic waste than we have the capacity to responsibly deal with. We just throw too much of it away. But there’s no ‘away’ when it comes to plastic, not in any biodegradable sense.
When I was reporting on a marine plastic pollution study back in 2020, I visited a disused, capped landfill site on the northwest coast of England and saw decades-old plastic bags poking out of the ground. Rubbish that was thrown away years earlier was finding its way back into the environment.
As one materials scientist said to me when we were discussing th
