Remote Island Chain Has Few People — But Hundreds Of Millions Of Pieces Of Plastic
The Cocos Keeling Islands make up barely 6 square miles in the Indian Ocean. It's a good place to measure debris because almost no one lives there. Scientists were flabbergasted by what they found.
When a marine biologist from Australia traveled to a remote string of islands in the Indian Ocean to see how much plastic waste had washed up on the beaches, here's just part of what she found: "373,000 toothbrushes and around 975,000 shoes, largely flip-flops," says Jennifer Lavers of the University of Tasmania in Australia.
