Is It Getting Worse? Fifteen Years of Data Say Yes, But Not How You’d Think

It’s the question we get asked more than any other, at talks, on the beach, in emails from worried strangers: is plastic pollution getting worse? For years, our honest answer had to be “it’s complicated.”

A new paper from the Adrift Lab team, published in the journal Earth’s Future, finally gives us something closer to a straight answer, and it’s one that only 15 years of unglamorous, unbroken fieldwork could have produced.

Since 2010, we’ve been checking the stomachs of Sable Shearwater fledglings on Lord Howe Island, counting and weighing every scrap of plastic before the birds take their first flight. That’s 15 breeding seasons, thousands of birds, and enough data to ask a question most plastic pollution studies simply can’t answer: not just how much plastic these birds are being fed, but whether the problem is changing shape over time, and whether a shorter study would have told us the truth.

The short answer to that second question is no. Had this project run for only three years, the kind of window that fits inside a typical graduate research project, our conclusions would have been close to a coin flip. Depending on exactly which three years we’d studied, we could have concluded plastic ingestion was rising, falling, or going nowhere at all. Widen that window to five years (the duration of a single IG grant) and the picture sharpens a little, but it still would have missed what’s happening now. It’s only with the full 15-year run that an unmistakable trend emerges: a rapid, accelerating rise in the amount of plastic packed into the most heavily affected chicks, especially since 2022.

And that rise has been dramatic. The single most plastic-laden chick we recorded held the unwanted record for almost a decade, 276 pieces and 64 grams of plastic, found in 2011. We assumed it was as bad as it could physically get; we couldn’t imagine more plastic being physically able to sit inside the stomach of a 90-day-old chick.

We were wrong. Very wrong.

That record fell in 2023, fell again in 2024, and then, in 2025, was shattered: one chick was found carrying 894 pieces of plastic. Meanwhile, the proportion of birds carrying any plastic at all has barely moved in 15 years, sitting steadily around 75 to 85%. That’s the volatility we’re describing, not a slow, steady climb, but sudden, unpredictable pulses layered on top of a longer-term upward trend, the kind of “good year, bad year” pattern that a short study window would read as noise rather than signal.

This is what makes plastic pollution such a difficult system to manage or even talk about honestly. Like extreme weather, it doesn’t move in a straight line. A single bad year doesn’t tell you much on its own, and neither does a single good year. It’s only by holding a long, continuous dataset up against these fluctuations that a genuine trend, rather than a snapshot of noise, becomes visible.

So, is it getting worse? For Sable Shearwaters on Lord Howe Island, yes, unmistakably, particularly over the last five years. But the more important message from this paper may be about how we ask the question in the first place. Short studies risk giving us false reassurance and false alarm in equal measure. And unfortunately most of our knowledge about plastic ingestion in seabirds comes from short studies, some decades old from a time when plastic production was just a small fraction of what it is today. Should we really be basing our policies, management, and understanding of the increasing impact of this persistent environmental problem on such data? Clearly, no.

Long-term, sustained monitoring, of the kind Adrift Lab has been able to run for a decade and a half without government funding, is what turns anecdote into evidence.

Read the full paper: “Abrupt recent increases in plastic ingestion by Sable Shearwaters,” by Jennifer L. Lavers, Alix M. de Jersey, Jack Rivers-Auty, and Alexander L. Bond, published in Earth’s Future.