I was recently stopped in my tracks by what I’d describe as a ‘cutely apocalyptic’ photograph. It was of a small, beady-eyed, purple-hued hermit crab with its fragile abdomen tucked neatly into a bright red object.
This ‘shell’ provided the little crustacean with a perfectly proportioned, easily manoeuvrable piece of armour. Only it wasn’t a shell in the conventional sense, it was a discarded plastic bottle top. The image is a moving depiction of the extent of the global issue of plastic pollution we are currently facing.
Hermit crabs scavenge items from the seabed and tuck themselves inside them for protection. It’s due to this habit of finding themselves a home and carrying it around on their backs that they earned their delightful name.
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But these days, many of them are picking up and hiding inside bits of rubbish that we throw away rather than their usual habit of finding a beautiful, coiled snail shell to nestle into.
This alarming discovery was made by a group of Polish researchers – based at the universities of Warsaw and Poznan – by carrying out what they term an ‘internet ecology study’. For the study, the team scoured social media for pictures of hermit crabs adorned with human trash. And they found a lot of them – a total of 386 pictures from every tropical coast around the world.
Some of the crabs had metal bottle caps on their backs and at least one was seen wearing the end of a broken light bulb, but 85 per cent of them had taken up home in pieces of discarded plastic.
Read more:
- How does plastic get into the oceans?
- Why is black plastic so difficult to recycle?
- Does the plastic debris found in bottled water affect our bodies?
According to a 2021 report by the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), in just 65 years, plastic production increased by an almost unimaginable 18,300 per cent – fuelled by our relentless ‘convenience lifestyle’.
We are now, says the EIA, producing more plastic waste than we have the capacity to responsibly deal with. We just throw too much of this stuff away. But of course, there is no ‘away’ when it comes to plastic, not in any biodegradable sense.
When I was reporting on a marine plastic pollution study back in 2020, I visited a disused, capped landfill site on the northwest coast of England and saw decades-old plastic bags poking out of the ground. Rubbish that was thrown away years earlier was finding its way back into the environment.
As one materials scientist said to me when we were discussing the horrifically cute image of the hermit crab, “We have something to learn from these creatures. They are making good use of a useful material instead of chucking it into landfill”.
Recycling may seem like the obvious solution to the ever-growing plastic pile-up, but it isn’t working, at least not at the scale we need it to. According to one major study on the fate of plastics, as of 2015, more than 6,000 million metric tonnes of plastic waste has been generated due to human activity, just 9 per cent of which has been recycled.
The case for reusing plastic
So, what’s the solution? According to Mark Miodownik, professor of materials and society at University College London, someone who once told me he feels genuinely upset on bin day by seeing all of that useful material being sent to landfill, reuse is the best way forward.
One of the biggest, most concerted efforts to bring reuse into the mainstream is a platform called Loop, which is teaming up with a coalition of major brands to operate what it is calling a ‘global reverse supply chain’. That’s marketing speak for an idea that is genuinely smart and actually very simple – the organisation collects used packaging from consumers and retailers via deposit return schemes, sorts and cleans it and then returns it to manufacturers to be refilled or reused.
Of course, we can all also contribute to our own little, domestic reuse revolution by using plastic we already have for as long as possible. While this can put a dent in the issue, manufacturers still need to stop making so much unnecessary plastic in the first place. Figures show that global plastic production doubled from 2000 to 2019, reaching a staggering total of 460 million tonnes.
But it’s not all doom and gloom. This year promises to be an important one for rewriting the plastic waste rulebook. Some 175 nations have already signed up to a promise that by the end of the year, they will agree to a binding treaty to end plastic pollution. It’s being touted as the plastic pollution equivalent of climate pledges such as the Kyoto Protocol or Paris Agreement.
But as we have previously witnessed, through the ups and downs seen in UN climate negotiations, it can take a long time for promises made in global treaties to be turned into practice.
However, the case remains that the only way to turn off the tap while we fix the catastrophic leak that is single-use plastic production is a global treaty to cap its production.
In the meantime, maybe we should take the little crustaceans’ example onboard and reuse as much of a material that is already all too abundant as we can. As the lead researcher on the Polish hermit crab study Zuzanna Jagiello says, “The animals are simply making use of what is available to them”.
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