Turtle Injured by Plastic Is Reminder of 'Devastating Impact' of Marine Debris, Sydney Environmentalists Say

An endangered green turtle admitted to intensive care with a “stomach full of plastics” is a “powerful reminder of the devastating impact marine debris can have on our sea life,” environmentalists in Sydney said on June 7, ahead of World Ocean Day.

Footage from SEA LIFE Aquarium shows a healthy Tama the turtle, who was found as a hatchling in critical condition on a Sydney beach in May last year. She was rehabilitated and is living at the aquarium until her scheduled release this year.

The video also shows representatives from the environmental cleanup project Seabin and the Sydney aquarium rifling through a day’s worth of trash collected by one of Seabin’s units.

“The elimination of plastic pollution in our water is paramount if we want to protect endangered turtles like Tama and other precious sea life,” SEA LIFE Sydney Aquarium’s Lauren Hughes said.

The aquarium has become an official sponsor of Seabin’s program to address plastic pollution.

“Together, with the SEA LIFE Sydney Aquarium unit, we will work towards a goal to collect over 1,000 kilograms (1 ton) of ocean waste per year, and utilise the data from these catches to help turn off the tap to plastic pollution," said Fallon White, Seabin’s head of global partnerships. Credit: Seabin Project/SEA LIFE Sydney Aquarium via Storyful

Video transcript

- This is Tama. She is our rescue green turtle. So she was found washed up on Tamarama Beach in critical condition. It was predominantly the plastics that she ingested. That was the really big problem for her.

- Yeah. This gets me so excited because obviously the work we do at Seabin, it's-- it's obviously about improving water quality, but we see so much sick marine life in Sydney Harbor just because of the plastic pollution and the fuel contaminants.

- She's very, very lucky to have survived what she did. She was in critical condition, super emaciated. So I'm just as excited--

- Yeah

- --to be working with you guys because it means that endangered species just like Tama have a better chance of survival.

So we're at the Sea Life unit. Come and have a look. We'll see what it's caught overnight. This is how we empty the unit every day. It gets emptied once every 24 hours because that's what our data set's based on. So yeah, we'll see what it's caught overnight.

- Let's do it.

- Our global average is about 4 kilograms per unit per day. And this feels roughly like 4 kilograms, I reckon.

Bottle tops, soft food packaging. But then, once we dig through all the seaweed, we notice the really scary ones. So these are microplastics and microfibers, and this is the really scary stuff that we're trying to bring awareness to, especially in Sydney Harbor.

We're catching hundreds of thousands of these a day, and this is exactly what would have been inside poor Tama the turtle because this stuff's relatively easy to remove. You can see it. You can walk along the beach and pick these up, but these tiny little items are what are really hurting marine life in particular.

- Yeah, for sure.

- Polystyrene like this, it looks like one piece of material, but it just breaks up into--

- Yeah.

- --hundreds and hundreds.