Ahead of Earth Month, Ocean Conservancy is launching a free, publicly available website, WildlifeImpactCalculator.org, to enable people who clean up beaches and waterways worldwide to determine how many marine animals they are helping protect with their efforts.
“Every piece of plastic cleaned up from our beaches and waterways is one less threat to the life of a marine animal,” said Ocean Conservancy’s Senior Director of Conservation Cleanups Allison Schutes. “Our calculator shows just how much of a difference a cleanup can make for these amazing creatures.”
Wildlife Impact Calculator website users can enter the number of specific plastic items collected from a beach or waterway to see how many animal lives would have been at risk had those items been ingested. The tool incorporates over 20 types of plastic pollution that have been found inside marine animals, including fishing debris, bottle caps, plastic fragments, lids, straws, plastic utensils, plastic bottles, plastic/foam plates, balloons, plastic bags and food wrappers, up to a cap of 9,999 pieces of plastic for each item type.
These types of plastic are among the most commonly found items polluting beaches and waterways worldwide by the millions of volunteers who have taken part in Ocean Conservancy’s International Coastal Cleanup (ICC) over its 40-year history.
Underlying the Wildlife Impact Calculator is award-winning peer-reviewed research led by Ocean Conservancy scientists and published last November in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) that quantifies the deadly dose of macroplastics (plastic pieces larger than 5mm) ingested by seabirds, sea turtles, and marine mammals.
“We wanted to make the science as easy to understand as possible and give people the ability to measure the difference they can make,” said Ocean Conservancy’s Manager of Ocean Plastics Research Dr. Erin Murphy, lead co-author of the study underlying the Wildlife Impact Calculator.
“The models informing the calculator look at amounts of plastic in terms of pieces, but how does that relate to items that people are picking up off of beaches? That’s what we wanted to show.”
Like the research, the Wildlife Impact Calculator does not capture the full threat plastic pollution poses to ocean wildlife, since macroplastic ingestion is just one way animals are affected. Other impacts include entanglement as well as the long-term cumulative effects of microplastic ingestion, or exposure to toxic chemicals that leach from plastics when in the ocean.
An estimated 11 million metric tons of plastic flow into the ocean each year – one of the most pervasive global threats to ocean health. Scientists have documented that some 1,300 species across ocean ecosystems – from plankton to whales – ingest plastics, too often with deadly consequences.
In addition to organizing cleanups to reduce harm from plastics already in the environment, Ocean Conservancy advocates for solutions to plastic pollution that prevent it from reaching beaches and waterways in the first place. Ocean Conservancy has advocated for a number of plastics policies at the local, state, federal and international levels such as California’s SB54, Florida’s balloon release ban, the Farewell to Foam Act, the UN Plastics Treaty, and more.
“We hope that the Wildlife Impact Calculator will inspire people to take action not only by joining their local cleanup efforts but by supporting work to prevent plastic from becoming pollution in the first place,” said Dr. Britta Baechler, Ocean Conservancy’s director of ocean plastics research.