More than 48 pounds of plastic, including disposable dishes, a corrugated tube, shopping bags and a detergent package with its bar code still visible, were found inside a dead sperm whale in Italy, the World Wildlife Fund said on Monday.
The whale, a young female, washed ashore in Porto Cervo, a seaside resort in the north of the Italian island of Sardinia. It was also carrying a fetus “in an advanced state of decomposition,” the fund said.
This was the latest in a grim international collection of whale carcasses burdened by dozens of pounds of plastic trash.
Last month, a whale was found dead on a Philippine beach with 88 pounds of plastic in its body. More than 1,000 assorted pieces of plastic were discovered inside a decomposing whale in Indonesia in November. A sperm whale died in Spain last year after being unable to digest more than 60 pounds of plastic trash.
“Plastic is one of the worst enemies of marine species,” the World Wildlife Fund said on Monday.
The whale in Porto Cervo was found on Thursday, according to a Facebook post by SeaMe Sardinia, a nonprofit organization that studies marine mammals. The cause of death is still being investigated, but the quantity of plastic found is unusual for a whale of its size, about 26 feet, the World Wildlife Fund said.
“The amount of plastic found in the cetacean’s digestive tract was practically intact, and the proportion between the size of the animal and the ingested plastic is particularly significant,” it said in a statement on Monday.
Europe is the second-largest producer of plastics in the world, “dumping 150,000-500,000 tons of macroplastics and 70,000-130,000 tons of microplastics in the sea every year,” according to a report the fund published in June.
Surveys suggest that has left the Mediterranean with some of the highest microplastic pollution levels in the world.
Partly in response to such findings, the European Union Parliament voted last week to approve a ban on many single-use plastic products, including disposable plastic straws, cutlery and plates.
Those measures are scheduled to take effect by 2021. On Sunday, in a Facebook post that featured a picture of the dead whale, Italy’s environment minister, Sergio Costa, promised his country would be one of the first to carry out the ban.
This sort of pollution, he wrote, “afflicts the whole marine world, not just Italy, of course, but every country in the world has the duty to apply the policies to fight it: not today, yesterday.”
“Is there still someone who says that these are not important problems?” he asked.
