Plastic pollution causes extensive suffering in marine animals through entanglement and ingestion, with millions of marine animals killed or injured annually by plastic waste entering ocean ecosystems.
Marine plastic pollution causes both acute and chronic suffering at massive scale. Entangled animals may struggle for hours or days before dying or being rescued. Ingested plastic causes a gradual starvation that may take weeks or months to prove fatal. Seabird and sea turtle populations show documented population-level impacts from plastic mortality. The welfare scale is enormous - millions of individual animals suffer from plastic annually. While cleanup efforts address symptoms, reducing plastic production and improving waste management address the root cause.