How Easter Island is swamped by deluge of plastic

Ocean currents are dumping tides of multinational rubbish on to the shores of one of the world's most remote habitats

- Jonathan Franklin

F rom a distance, the colourful beach at Ovahe seems a postcard-perfect mosaic of natural beauty. Craggy volcanic boulders, pockmarked from bubbling lava, jut from the sand, garnished by a necklace of pastel-coloured corals and seashells pounded to pieces by the wild, crashing surf.

As the waves pull back, however, another reality emerges. The sand holds few corals or shells. Instead, the high-tide mark is a carpet of plastics polished into an array of bleached Coca-Cola reds and Pepsi blues.

"Look at all this," says Kina Paoa Kannegiesser, 22, using a kitchen sieve to scoop up bottle caps, shampoo bottle shards and disposable razors. The ocean rubbish is crammed into every nook and cranny along this remote beach on Easter Island, a 163 sq km speck of land.

About 3,700km west of central Chile, Easter Island (also known as Rapa Nui) is among the most remote spots on Earth- and among the most polluted. It is estimated that 50 times more plastic washes ashore on these beaches than on the Chilean mainland, largely a result of the vast spiralling current known as the South Pacific gyre. This current acts like a funnel, sucking in plastic from as far away as the Galápagos Islands and New Zealand and, with every tide, depositing a wave of floating rubbish.

Picking through the sand, Paoa Kannegiesser holds an example of a coral colony forming on the lattice of a plastic fish bin discarded by the industrial fishing fleets that almost encircle this island as they chase dwindling schools of tuna. She collects fish bins by the dozen and lately has been finding coral that has fused with the debris to form an organic-plastic sandwich.