At a Glance

Rarely has a human set foot on Henderson Island in the South Pacific.Its pristine beauty is marred by hundreds of pieces of garbage that washes ashore every single day.

A remote island in the South Pacific, known as Henderson Island, was once considered one of the most pristine islands in the world, untouched by humans. Sadly,it now more resembles a garbage dump than a deserted island.

In ,biologist Jennifer Lavers, a marine ecotoxicologist from the University of Tasmania, and Alexander Bond, a conservation scientist from the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, detailed the deplorable state in which they found the once beautiful island.

A , the island lies some 3,000 miles from anywhere and is reached after a13-day voyage by ship from New Zealand.

Lavers and her colleagues visited the island for four months beginning in May 2015 and say they foundabout 37.7 million pieces, or 17.6 tons, of mostly plastic trash. They noted it isthe highest density of trash ever reported in nature.

“The human footprint is everywhere, and it runs deeper than most of us imagine,” . “[Henderson Island] is a remarkably beautiful and unique place that is suffering immensely at the hands of humans that have never set foot on the island, never even heard its name.”

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Roughly 3,600 pieces of trasharrive on the island each day, carried to the island on the ocean's currents, the report stated.

“Hundreds of land crabs now make their homes out of broken, toxic plastic debris washed up on Henderson Island,” Lavers said.

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