Diver posts video showing current of plastic in Indonesian ocean

WHEN you’re swimming in paradise you don’t expect to come across this.

OUR oceans have a serious plastic problem.

One million plastic bottles are bought every minute around the globe and most of them end up in landfill where they take a significant time to break down, or in the ocean where they kill marine life.

If it’s not bottles, it’s plastics bags and other plastic-based packaging that can find its way into our waterways and harm wildlife.

This disheartening state of affairs has been highlighted in a stunning way by a diver who filmed himself swimming through a barrage of plastic, 20km off the coast of Bali.

British man Richard Horner filmed the scene while diving off the coast of Nusa Penida, a small island not far from the popular tourist destination.

“The ocean currents brought us in a lovely gift of a slick of jellyfish, plankton, leaves, brunches, fronds, sticks, etc ... Oh, and some plastic,” he wrote in the video’s caption.

Indonesia is one of the worst offenders when it comes to plastic waste. A January paper published in the journal Science estimated that Indonesian reefs averaged 25.6 plastic pieces per 100sq m.

The paper detailed how plastic waste in oceans is associated with a drastically higher rate of disease on coral reefs.

“Disease likelihood increased 20-fold once a coral was draped in plastic,” researchers wrote. “Plastic debris stresses coral through light deprivation, toxin release, and anoxia, giving pathogens a foothold for invasion.”

Diver Richard Horner said he’d never seen anything on this scale.

Once the waste ends up in the ocean it gets swept up by currents and becomes very difficult to retrieve.

Mr Horner first posted the video to Facebook where it was shared more than 19,000 times. In the description, Mr Horner wrote that he’d “never seen anything like this scale.”

But sadly, it’s tipped to get worse.

A report by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation launched last year at the World Economic Forum found the equivalent of a garbage truck worth of plastic bottles was being dumped into the ocean every minute.

“The ocean is expected to contain one tonne of plastic for every three tonnes of fish by 2025, and by 2050, more plastics than fish (by weight),” the report stated.

It’s predicted plastic could outweigh fish in the ocean by 2050.

Most parts of Australia have been slow to introduce anti-plastic measures such as banning single use plastic bags. However, late last year Victoria promised to ban them “as soon as possible” leaving NSW as the only state not to fully commit to a future ban. Queensland and Western Australia will ban them from later this year.

The Greens have previously declared a war on plastic bags and microbeads to save Australia’s oceans.

Last month Greens senator Peter Whish-Wilson called on the government to take seriously the issue of plastics pollution in the ocean, an issue that has drawn responses from countries around the world and even the Queen.

“We have no plan at all in this country, and we’re a country girt by sea,” Senator Whish-Wilson told reporters in Canberra.