The Sunshine Coast Clean Up Divers (SCCUD) gather once a month in order to clean up plastic from the waterways along the Queensland coast in Australia. This time, they found one particular bit of plastic waste that paints a horrifying picture of our pollution.
The volunteer divers found a KFC bag lodged under a few rocks under eight metres of water. Elliot Peters then sent a picture of the bag to KFC, who looked estimated it was about 30 to 40 years old.
Yes, a plastic bag discarded four decades ago and probably sitting immersed in water for all that time was barely disintegrated.
“It’s hard to say [how long the bag had been there], but obviously you don’t keep a KFC bag lying around and then drop it into the water 40 years later, so it’s obviously been around in the environment somewhere, whether underwater or not,” Peters said. “We hear about how long plastics last, especially as microplastics, but for a plastic bag that wasn’t really thick … and still mainly intact and identifiable and 40 years old.”
