THE SECRETS SCAT KEEPS: SCAT CHAT EPISODE SIX RUNDOWN

Scat Chat with WWF-Australia, hosted by me, Carlo Ritchie. Every episode of Scat Chat with WWF I get to the bottom of all the things that animal scat - or poo - can teach us about the animals that made it. Listen now for free at wwf.org.au/scatchat.

Scat is one of the great storytellers. So far as part of the Scat Chat with WWF series, it’s told us how to find koalas, what eastern quolls are having for dinner, where wombats make their homes, how it feeds oxygen-producing phytoplankton, and now, scat has a story to tell about us as humans, and how we’re having an impact on the planet every day. How do we know this? Our poo told us.

On the sixth and final episode of WWF-Australia’s podcast, Scat Chat with WWF, I set out to discover what a six-month-old green turtle named Pretzel in emergency care, and I have in common.

To do that, I caught up with WWF-Australia’s No Plastics in Nature Policy Manager, Kate Noble, to learn about the role scat plays in helping to inform government policies, as well as the most important lesson of all: that the plastic was in me all along.

As Kate told me in the episode, “Two tiny turtles were admitted to the Byron Bay Wildlife Hospital, which is supported by WWF, and then transferred to SeaWorld Gold Coast for treatment. They were washed up on the beach after the floods in early 2022. Sadly, one of them didn’t make it, and the second turtle, named Pretzel, looked pretty sick. Some x-rays revealed that he had microplastics in his gut. Now, this little guy was just a few weeks old. So, during his short life, he'd already ingested four or five pieces of plastic. And we know from CSIRO research that ingesting just one piece of plastic increases the chance of a turtle dying.”

Kate continued, “Pretzel was really lucky. He was provided with a laxative and managed to poop out most of the plastic. It just gives you a sense of, you know, this is just one turtle, right? And the number of turtles that are in the environment that are consuming plastic - it’s a big problem for these tiny little guys. Even before they hit six months or a year old.”

But it’s not just turtles. Plastic is wreaking havoc on so much of our marine wildlife. After imagining Pretzel going back into the wild and running his own recycling facility, I started thinking about plastic. If it’s so bad for the environment, why do we use so much?

According to Kate, “There's a lot of money to be made out of plastics. Part of how lucrative that business is, is around pushing convenience and consumer lifestyle. So, we've all become accustomed to using things for a tiny amount of time, which means we can pick them up and take them with us, sit on the beach, walk to work and then throw them out. And when you think about it, you know, once you start accumulating the levels of waste that accompany that kind of lifestyle, it's enormous. Australians use something like 1.8 billion disposable coffee cups every year.”

I rest easy knowing I’m not contributing to the problem. When I go to a café, I cup my hands together so the barista can fill them up. Then I drink my coffee like I’m drinking from a lake. My hands are terribly burned, but my conscience is clear.

Unfortunately, however, coffee cups are only a small piece of the plastic puzzle. Plastic is in everything. From the packaging our food and clothes come in, to the cards and even cash, we use to buy them, all the way to our food chain. And while plastic can be a useful, durable product, there’s a lot that we’re using and don’t need, and it’s causing real harm in our environment.

Kate explained, “There's been a lot of research over the last 10 to 20 years on how plastics impact animals, but increasingly looking at plastics in animal and human bodies. Whether it's getting into the blood supply, getting into their organs or just staying in their digestive tract.”

“We don't know exactly what the human health impacts are going to be yet, but what's really clear is that it's everywhere and we really need to get a grip on it. We need to just cut it off at the source and really turn off the plastic tap.”

It’s everywhere! Which seems crazy, until you think about just how much plastic is around us all the time. The average Australian uses 130kg of plastic each year. Only 12% of which is recycled. Up to 130,000 tonnes of plastic from Australia will find its way into our waterways and oceans, adding to the more than 9 million metric tonnes of plastic that leaks into oceans every year, with devastating effects on our marine wildlife.

Turtles choking on plastic bags they’ve mistaken for jellyfish, seabirds getting entangled in drifting fishing gear, whales and dolphins starving to death because their stomachs are so full of the plastic debris they’ve eaten.

“Plastic is causing a range of serious injuries, diseases, illnesses, and death in marine species,” Kate explained. “Quite a lot of marine species. Coral can ingest plastic as well. And we now know that plastic is in some of the shellfish we eat and some of the water we drink.”

Plastic has been discovered in places as deep as the Mariana Trench. It’s affected more than 800 different marine species that we know of, and it’s not just in the ocean, it’s in farm animals too, so it’s no wonder that plastic is in all of us as well. One study, albeit with a small sample size, has even found microplastics in meconium, which is a newborn baby's first ever poo.

But what can we do about it? Well, WWF-Australia continues to work to encourage state and territory governments to transition away from single-use plastics toward a more sustainable approach through their 2022 Plastics Scorecard. And there are small actions we can take every day that might seem like a drop in the ocean, but what is the ocean, if not a body of water comprised of millions upon millions of drops?

Consider using a reusable cup if you don’t want to burn your hands and drink your coffee like you’re drinking from a lake. Not only will you help Australia cut down on the billions of disposable coffee cups we use each year, you’ll also influence other people and drive change through your actions. Studies show by normalising the act of carrying around a reusable cup, we can make it less acceptable to use disposable products. So next time you’re walking about town with your coffee in your reusable coffee cup, you are doing real good for the planet and our oceans.

You can also take action to avoid the six top priority single-use plastics in your day-to-day life, such as plastic bottles, soft ‘scrunchable’ plastics, disposable foodware, disposable packaging and containers, cigarettes and microplastics.

For a full list of eco-friendly alternatives to common plastics go to https://www.wwf.org.au/news/blogs/10-worst-single-use-plastics-and-eco-friendly-alternatives

Scat is a great storyteller, but the best stories are original and not made of plastic.

Listen to Scat Chat with WWF now on your favourite podcast platform!

Or watch the episodes on YouTube.

Want to get more involved to help?

Try out WWF’s 'My Backyard' tool to discover what threatened animals live in your area, and how you can help them.