Every minute, the equivalent of a garbage truck of plastic enters the ocean. For a sea turtle, a floating plastic bag looks exactly like a jellyfish — one of its favourite meals.
What Ends Up in Their Stomachs
When we perform necropsies on turtles that did not survive, we routinely find bottle caps, fishing line, cigarette filters and fragments of packaging. A stomach full of plastic gives a false sense of fullness, and the animal slowly starves.
The Invisible Threat: Microplastics
Bigger debris is at least visible. Microplastics — tiny fragments smaller than a grain of rice — are already inside plankton, coral polyps and the fish we eat. They carry chemicals that disrupt hormones and reproduction across the food chain.
Our lab samples water from three sites around Nungwi every month. Every sample so far has contained microplastic fibres, most of them from synthetic clothing washed hundreds of kilometres away.
What We Do About It
Our team collects plastic waste from beaches every week and uses it as teaching material in schools across Unguja. The message is simple: refuse, reduce, reuse, recycle — in that order.
We host a monthly Beach Sweep open to visitors and locals. Last year those sweeps removed more than 3.2 tonnes of plastic from just four kilometres of coastline.
Reasons for Hope
There is hope. Local businesses are switching to paper straws and reusable bottles, and Zanzibar's plastic bag ban is showing measurable results on our beaches — visible plastic bag counts have fallen by roughly 60% since the ban took effect.
Change is possible. It starts with the bottle you refuse today.
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