At a Glance

Beaches at Cocos Islands are littered with an estimated 238 tons of plastic, including 977,000 shoes and 373,000 toothbrushes.Half of the plastic produced over the past 60 years was manufactured within the last 13 years.

Australia's Cocos (Keeling) Islands is home to more than 400 million pieces of plastic pollution like hundreds of thousands of shoes and toothbrushes.

A survey by the University of Tasmania’s Institute of Marine and Antarctic Studies (IMAS) found that beaches on the remote Indian Ocean islands are littered with 238 tons of plastic, including , according to the study published this week in the journal Nature.

Lead author Jennifer Lavers noted that her team's estimates are conservative.

“Our estimate of on Cocos (Keeling) is conservative, as we only sampled down to a depth of 10 centimeters (4 inches) and couldn’t access some beaches that are known debris ‘hotspots,'" Lavers said in a press release.

Lavers led another study in May 2017 that found the beaches on Henderson Island in the South Pacific had the highest density of plastic debris reported anywhere on Earth.

The pollution on Henderson was primarily fishing-related, Lavers noted, while the plastic on Cocos was "largely single-use consumer items such as bottle caps and straws, as well as a large number of shoes and thongs (flip flops).'"

With the amount of plastic debris found on remote islands like Henderson and the Cocos, Lavers said it's a jarring indicator of the amount of plastics circulating in our oceans.

“Islands such as these are like canaries in a coal mine and it’s increasingly urgent that we act on the warnings they are giving us,” Lavers said. “Plastic pollution is now ubiquitous in our oceans, and remote islands are an ideal place to get an objective view of the volume of plastic debris now circling the globe."

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Co-author Annett Finger of Australia's Victoria University noted that half of the plastic produced over the past 60 years was manufactured within the last 13 years.

“An estimated 12.7 million tons of plastic entered our oceans in 2010 alone, with around 40 percent of plastics entering the waste stream in the same year they’re produced,” Finger said, adding that it is estimated that there are now 5.25 trillion pieces of ocean plastic debris as a result of the boom from single-use consumer plastics.

Finger offered the grim news that the scope of the problem means "cleaning up our oceans is currently not possible."

"Cleaning beaches once they are polluted with plastic is time consuming, costly, and needs to be regularly repeated as thousands of new pieces of plastic wash up each day," she added. “The only viable solution is to reduce plastic production and consumption while improving waste management to stop this material entering our oceans in the first place."

Noting the amount of single-use plastic debris found on Cocos Islands, Laver said the discovery offers "a great opportunity for us to see ourselves in this debris and figure out how we can remove at least one of these items from our day to day activities."