Peter Whish-Wilson (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise tonight to talk about an article in The Conversation this week by Tasmanian scientist Dr Jennifer Lavers, with whom I have been lucky enough to work in past years as part of the Surfrider Foundation. Her article is titled 'Plastic and politics: how bureaucracy is failing our forgotten wildlife'. Dr Lavers has spent most of her scientific life studying seabirds, particularly the flesh-footed shearwater, which most Tasmanians are very familiar with. The reason seabirds are important is that they are often seen as a barometer or a poster child for our healthy ocean. Key factors for that include that they tend to help fishermen identify fishing hotspots which are biodiversity hotspots, and their population numbers are highly linked to the richness of the ocean in those areas. They also cover very large geographical areas.

Unfortunately, all the data to date shows that the flesh-footed shearwater species is in severe decline. It is a large, conspicuous seabird, it is very obvious from its raucous call and it covers wide expanses of the Pacific and Indian oceans, but the main breeding grounds are on our doorstep here in Australia. The largest population is on Lord Howe Island, where Dr Lavers spends a lot of her time studying the resident populations of shearwaters, with remaining populations spread across south and western Australia and New Zealand. Dr Lavers believes from her research work, which has been backed up by other marine scientists, that their breeding grounds are in trouble.

The Lord Howe Island population has declined by around 50 per cent since studies started in 1978. New Zealand's population was revised from 25,000 breeding pairs of shearwaters in 2000 to around 11,600 pairs in 2010, with breeding abandoned on 10 islands. In Western Australia, a survey that Dr Lavers conducted herself—the first in almost 35 years studying the shearwater—found the population hovering at less than 50,000 pairs. Dr Lavers acknowledges multiple factors that are causing the decline of the shearwater: encroaching urbanisation, by-catch mortality in fisheries and introduced predators. The key focus of her study and her key point of concern is the serious threat to populations from plastic pollution in the marine environment.

Accumulations of rubbish in the North Pacific Gyre were first noticed 20 years ago. I have talked several times about the gyre and the garbage patch in the ocean. Each day our oceans are fed with more than 20 million new plastic items, or around 6.4 million tonnes per year of plastics. Winds and wave motions send this right around the globe. Lots of Australia's garbage often washes up in other countries, and other countries' garbage—particularly plastic—washes up on Australian beaches. This brings us back to the flesh-footed shearwater. More than 75 per cent of shearwater chicks on Lord Howe Island that have been studied contain large quantities of plastic fed to them by their parents, who mistake it for food. In 2011 one dead chick that Dr Lavers examined had more than 275 pieces of plastic in its stomach—the equivalent of a human eating around eight kilograms of plastic.

Clearly, eating plastic is never going to be a good idea, but new evidence suggests that it might be worse than we previously thought. It is not just the injection of this plastic that causes starvation in these birds by taking up most of their stomach space: we also know that those plastics are toxic to marine life. The three toxic substances known to accumulate on plastic, particularly plastic floating in the ocean, include phthalates, PCBs and heavy metals. They attach themselves to floating bits of debris. These accumulations have not only been noticed in seabirds but they have also been detected at worryingly high levels in the tissues of other sea creatures. More than 265 marine species are at risk from marine plastics, with new studies published every week showing fish, invertebrates such as mussels and sea cucumbers, and even algae are ingesting sea plastic. In fact, in the South Pacific Gyre garbage patch the disturbing statistic is that this area now contains up to 40 times more plastic than plankton, which is the basis of the food chain in the ocean. I am also informed that studies in the Southern Ocean in the Antarctic have found plastic in plankton. It is all the way through our food chain and all the way through our ocean, and massive amounts of plastic enter the ocean every year, mostly from our lifestyle and from packaging.

What can we do about it? Dr Lavers has applied under EPBC to have the shearwater listed as an endangered species. The paperwork has been sent in. Incidentally, in 2012 New Zealand listed their shearwaters as an endangered species, but after four years of applications we still do not have the species listed as vulnerable under EPBC law. Another thing we can do is look at our threat abatement plan under EPBC law for marine plastics. Injury and fatality to vertebrate marine life caused by ingestion of or entanglements in harmful marine debris was listed in August 2003 as a key threatening process under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999. I received some information recently from the Department of Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities as to how much of our TAP—our threat abatement plan—is being spent on marine debris. The number given to me was approximately $1.2 million over four years. That relates to 2008-12; however, no data has been compiled yet, and it may be 2014 before we see any research that has been done on marine plastics, the mitigation of marine plastics and what can be done to reduce plastics in our ocean.

Having been part of a group that has cleaned beaches for the last 10 years, I have travelled around from the south west of Tasmania on fishing boats and spent weeks picking up rubbish from Flinders Island and other parts of my state, as well as on the Great Barrier Reef and other parts of the country—even in Indonesia. And I know thousands of other people who do this on a regular basis. Clearly, collecting plastics from the beach is helpful, but you are never going to get it all. A lot of it is deposited under the sand or even at the dune line, and the first time there is a big surge, or a big storm, most of it gets washed back into the ocean.

We also know, particularly with beverage containers and plastic bottles, that a large number go to the bottom of the sea, where they get broken up by wave action and splinter into thousands of different pieces. They also photo degrade and continue to break up into pieces small enough to be ingested by plankton. We have a lot of evidence on this, and so the big question is: how do you go about addressing this issue? Every time I walk on the beach with my kids, I think about this. It is such an overwhelmingly large problem, you do not even know where to begin; it can get you down when you think about it. But one thing we do know is that product stewardship on packaging, particularly plastic packaging, does offer a solution.

It is not going to be a silver bullet by any means, but studies recently conducted by the CSIRO around Australian beaches—and these will be updated shortly—are part of the threat abatement plan and the money that is going to that. They have shown that plastic packaging—bottles consumed outside the home—are not just from Australia. Some of the stuff I have collected on the west coast of Tasmania has come from Africa, Europe and Taiwan, and so these plastic containers are from everywhere and make up about two-thirds of all items found on marine debris clean-ups.

So it is not just Australia that needs to clean up its act; clearly, this is something that has to be looked at globally. We do believe that container deposit schemes that at least start to address this issue at point of origin in places like Australia, the USA, China and right across the world will be necessary to start reining in the amount of packaging that is going into the oceans.

As I said, it is a vastly overwhelming problem. But, when you look at the shearwater, and the studies that are coming in on the damage that this plastic is doing to our ocean, we do need to start somewhere. We do have a responsibility, not only at a bureaucratic level and as Joe Citizen cleaning beaches and getting out for Clean Up Australia Day but also as parliamentarians who can put in place product stewardship schemes that address this issue and go directly to the source of taking plastics out of our ocean, allowing the shearwater and their chicks— (Time expired)