Protecting Europe’s seabirds: tackling plastic pollution with LIFE

Plastic is a defining material of our age – we use it and throw it away every day. But this has created a huge waste problem. According to UNEP data dated from 2021 , without meaningful action, the flow of plastic waste into aquatic ecosystems is expected to nearly triple from around 11 million tonnes in 2016 to around 29 million tonnes by 2040.     

This is taking a terrible toll on the birds that rely upon coastal and marine habitats. LIFE SeaBiL is trying to reduce the impacts of plastic on these animals  and identify the main sources of this pollution so they can be tackled. 

Plastic can affect seabirds in several ways. Some become entangled in plastic debris,  leading to injury and death. The birds can also eat small fragments of plastic, mistaking it for food or ingesting the material through prey that have eaten it. Once in a bird's digestive tract, plastic fragments can cause inflammation, scarring, affect their ability to eat and lead to multi-organ damage . The problem has become so acute that scientists now have a name for plastic-induced illness in birds – ‘plasticosis’. Some studies estimate that 74% -90% of seabirds have plastic in their stomachs. Yet, little is known about which species are most at risk from plastic pollution or which types of plastics cause the most harm. 

Working across five pilot sites at nature reserves and natural parks in France, Spain and Portugal, the LIFE SeaBiL project has established a transnational monitoring network for birds affected by plastic pollution. It has adapted an app – developed by one of the project partners, SEO Birdlife – to allow volunteers to report stranded or dead seabirds. Wildlife rescue and rehabilitation centres in the three countries can also use it to report stranded or stricken seabirds brought in by volunteers. 

Tissue samples from the birds are also sent for analysis by the project’s scientific partners to understand how they were affected by plastic pollution. One of the project partners, the Portuguese Society for the Study of Birds (SPEA), has also been surveying seabird nests on the Berlengas islands, near Lisbon, to estimate how plastic affects breeding sites. 
 

The ultimate aim, says Guillaume Le Hétet, coordinator of LIFE SeaBiL, is to ‘define one or several indicative species’ that can act as sentinels for how plastic pollution is affecting marine habitats and help to reveal how individual bird species are affected by plastic waste.     

Among the species worst affected by plastic waste around the Bay of Biscay to the north of Spain are Common guillemots, Atlantic puffins, black-legged kittiwakes, northern gannets, the Balearic shearwater, great shearwater and northern fulmars. But Cory’s sheawater and European shags are also important for helping to monitor the effects of marine litter during the breeding season in their colonies on the Berlengas islands, says Le Hétet.

Having seabird indicator species for the impacts of plastic waste could help EU Member States assess whether they have achieved Good Environmental Status, which is the main goal under the EU Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD), says Le Héte. Alongside this monitoring work, LIFE SeaBiL has been working in the five pilot sites to reduce the impact of beach clean-ups, which can inadvertently trample and disturb vulnerable shorebirds. Some, such as the Kentish plover (Charadrius alexandrinus), build their nests directly on the sand and so clean-up efforts need to take care not to accidentally harm them, says Le Hétet. The LIFE SeaBiL team have created a ‘low footprint’ guide for organisers of beach clean-ups and offered online training courses.

In 2023, 45 700 people took part in more than 555 litter picking events as part of the EU Beach Clean-up campaign and thousands more will take part in similar events this year. Le Hétet hopes the work being done by LIFE SeaBiL will help to inform the best way to conduct these clean-ups in the future.

The project has been training marine debris collectors at Natura 2000 sites in France and Spain so they can categorise litter in a standard way. Six ‘tidal bins’ to collect debris as it is washed ashore have also been installed at two of the pilot sites in Spain. The aim is to build a ‘common marine litter repository’, says Le Hétet so the sources of the litter can start to be identified. If they can do that, then perhaps the plastic can be stopped before it even becomes a problem.

The LIFE SeaBiL project not only contributes to the success of the Marine Strategy Framework Directive, the Beach Clean-up campaign and to the management and prevention of waste in Natura 2000 sites, but also the EU’s Plastics Strategy, the Birds and Habitats Directives, the Biodiversity Strategy 2030, and the OSPAR Convention for the Protection of the Marine Environment of the North-East Atlantic, of which the EU is a signatory.