Last month, her team Adrift Lab found a bird that broke the record: almost a fifth of its entire body weight was plastic.
“To witness it first-hand, it is incredibly visceral. There is now so much plastic inside the birds you can feel it on the outside of the animal when it is still alive. As you press on its belly … you hear the pieces grinding against each other."
Since Dr Lavers’s first visit in 2008, she has witnessed an increase from about three quarters of birds carrying about five to 10 pieces of plastic, to every single bird having 50 or more pieces.
It’s estimated that the total carbon contained by wild birds is 2.1 million tons. If we assume they’re roughly 20% C, that equates to 10.5 million tons of bird mass. So the weight of humanity’s annual plastic output is 45 times the combined mass of all wild birds on the planet.
That’s pretty bleak