Marine and terrestrial wildlife increasingly ingest plastic debris, causing internal injuries, nutritional deficiency, and death in millions of animals annually.
Plastic ingestion causes significant, measurable suffering in individual animals. Seabirds feed plastic fragments to chicks believing them to be food, causing malnutrition and gut impaction. Sea turtles mistake plastic bags for jellyfish; the bags cause intestinal blockage and buoyancy disorders preventing diving. The welfare harm is compounded by the persistence of plastic in the environment and the exponential scale of wildlife affected. Reducing plastic production at source, improving waste management, and cleaning existing pollution are all necessary interventions.