Camels: Plastic Eaters in the Desert
Five years ago, Dr. Marcus Eriksen was invited to the Middle East to witness something he didn’t know existed, the remains of camels and their affliction from plastic bags. After traversing over beautiful sand dunes and vast desert landscapes, he came upon multiple piles of white bones - the remains of camels wandering the desert. Inside each skeleton were masses of densely packed plastic bags. Dr. Eriksen and his team of scientists coined the term “polybezoars,” a synthetic mass of plastic waste residing in grazing mammals often until they die.
As part of his research study with other scientists (Ullrich Wernery, Mia Nixon and Amy Lusher), he recovered five polybezoars. Cutting them open in the lab, they revealed a mass of plastic bags and ropes all the way through, causing blockages, infections and perforated gut-linings in the afflicted camels. Dr. Wernery’s Central Veterinary Research Hospital has documented over 300 camels that died from polybezoars, out of 30,000 that live in the region. This signified an ecologically relevant concentration of 1% mortality rate, showcasing a significant problem afoot in the desert.
Why do camels eat plastic?
With so many camels munching on plastic, it is interesting to ask why they would gravitate towards it in the first place. As a camel, it is hard to find food in a barren environment like a desert, so if it’s not sand, it’s food. Plastic bags flying by in the wind and getting stuck in acacia trees look like the perfect thing to eat when resources are scarce. Camels also forage in landfills or illegal dump sites, and may be attracted to food waste and salts on plastic packaging items, and therefore ingest them.
When ingesting this trash, the camels can feel a false sense of satiation and refuse to eat further, which leads to dehydration, malnourishment and death, they reported. The indigestible materials also create gut blockages, ulcers and lacerations or deadly sepsis from abundant bacteria caught in the bags' folds. "We pulled one of these masses out of a camel skeleton that had over 2,000 bags in it. I cut this open and it was plastic bags through and through."
How do we solve this problem?
Single-use plastics, like bags, straws, and cups are used once and thrown away. They have far greater costs than the simple convenience you get for a few minutes of use. The industries that make them don’t want to stop making plastic bags because they’ve effectively convinced people and government leaders that consumers and cities are to blame for not recycling. Unfortunately, recycling was set up to fail as industries that use plastic refuse to set standards for designing products and packaging for recyclability, or set a required % of recycled plastic in new products. The true solution is the implementation of a circular economy worldwide, which includes eliminating single-use throwaway plastic items, like plastic bags. Through producer responsibility for plastic use, and a new economy around re-use, we will make strides to save animals like camels from being negatively impacted by their human influenced environments.
Many countries have independently banned single-use plastic items, but Eriksen and the 5 Gyres Institute urge world leaders--including the Biden-Harris Administration, which has been silent on this growing crisis -- to take bold, swift action by joining an international legally binding agreement to tackle plastic pollution under discussion this week at the UN Environmental Assembly (UNEA). The world's top environmental decision-making body, UNEA notes that "the planet is in crisis and nature must be at the heart of global efforts to build back better" after the coronavirus pandemic.
Oceanographer Charles J. Moore, credited with discovering and bringing the garbage patch concept to mainstream attention, echoes Eriksen's call.
"Today it is widely acknowledged that vagrant plastic waste is polluting oceans, rivers, soil, food, the water we consume, and even the air we breathe," Moore says. "We have to wake up and accept that this problem is much bigger than we’ve previously imagined. We have even found abundant evidence of plastic pollution in Earth orbit. It’s time to talk about this like the planetary emergency it is and take action."
Jane Patton, an environmental health policy advocate with the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL), echoed the urgency.
"This new latest study comes on the heels of others examining plastic in fish and birds and provides one more example of how the prevalence of plastic is having untold consequences on flora and fauna across the globe," said Jane Patton, CIEL senior campaigner. "Now we know this crisis is not just about human health, but the health of all beings. To confront the plastic crisis, it is critical that the world community adopt a new global agreement, addressing the entire plastic lifecycle."