Transcript

LEIGH SALES, PRESENTER: Every year, a group of volunteers makes an extraordinary trip to clean up some of Australia's most remote peaches. For a week dozens of people on fishing boats tackle Tasmania's rugged south-west coastline to pick up mountains of plastic. The rubbish comes from all over the world, choking what should be a pristine marine environment and killing wildlife. This year the group collected a record haul of almost 80,000 pieces of rubbish. Reporter Michael Atkin donned a lifejacket and went along.

MATT DELL, CLEAN-UP ORGANISER: We've got the boat packed and we're joining the flotilla heading down the coast.

MICHAEL ATKIN, REPORTER: This fishing boat is on its way to a week-long clean-up expedition in Tasmania's wild south-west.

MATT DELL: The purpose of the trip is to continue documenting the rubbish that's washing up in the south-west World Heritage area. It's the very south-west corner of Tasmania.

MICHAEL ATKIN: The journey into the Southern Ocean can be treacherous And today there's a 3.5-metre swell and 30-knot winds.

Clean-up volunteer Mosaki Koyama is ignoring the swell and fishing for dinner.

MOSAKI KOYAMA, CLEAN-UP VOLUNTEER: Oh, just waiting for tuna.

MICHAEL ATKIN: Tuna. You're hoping for a big tuna fish off the back.

MOSAKI KOYAMA: No, I hope not so big.

MICHAEL ATKIN: After a six-hour journey, the boat reaches quieter waters and drops anchor for the night at the Southwest National Park.

Early the next morning, the team heads for the beach and the clean-up begins.

MATT DELL: Alright, guys, thanks for coming. First beach for the trip. So the colours you'll see mostly are sort of the greens, a few blues, a few yellows. There'll be red and orange. Yeah, so just take your time.

MICHAEL ATKIN: The 2015 Marine Clean-up has kicked off here at Cox's Bight, one of the most remote beaches in Australia and inside Tasmania's World Heritage area. It looks untouched by humans, except it's not.

CLEAN-UP VOLUNTEER: Every plastic bottle and plastic bag that we use at home has to end up somewhere. It's pretty sad when it ends up here.

MICHAEL ATKIN: This is the 13th time environmental scientist Matt Dell has run the clean-up, and every trip, the pollution gets worse.

MATT DELL: It's so obvious in this beautiful environment when there's rubbish lying around. It's supposed to be our jewel of the environment in Tasmania.

MICHAEL ATKIN: A current along the East Coast of Australia sends rubbish from all over the world.

MATT DELL: Is there a little eddy that forms off the south-west corner of Tasmania and that helps bring rubbish from the Pacific Ocean as well as the Indian Ocean to the west, which is where all the westerly prevailing winds come from.

MICHAEL ATKIN: Ula Majewski is making this trip for the fourth time, but she's still overwhelmed by the huge volume of plastic.

ULA MAJEWSKI, CLEAN-UP VOLUNTEER: Our oceans and our coastlines are absolutely being choked by a toxic wave of plastic and the fact that we can come around here to some of the planet's most remote beaches and still clean up, for example, last year almost 50,000 pieces of rubbish in less than a week, is a really worrying sign for things to come.

MICHAEL ATKIN: Some plastics are so tiny, they're hard to spot.

STEVE, CLEAN-UP VOLUNTEER: Here's a big stash we just found.

MATT DELL: No worries. Thanks, Steve. This is pretty typical of certain corners of the beach and certain tide lines.

MICHAEL ATKIN: Marine birds like the shearwater make the potentially deadly mistake of eating the microplastics.

MATT DELL: Some beaches we'll pick up 2,000 or 3,000 of these in maybe 50 square metres. These are what the birds ingest. They can't - they can't digest them and their stomachs fill up and eventually they can't survive.

MICHAEL ATKIN: It's a cause that fisherman David Wyatt is passionate about. Every year he donates his boat to the clean-up and is disappointed his industry is polluting the ocean.

DAVE WYATT, FISHERMAN: That's the indication that we see is, like, ptrawl - arts of trawl net and parts of long-lining gear that may be lost in storms or washed overboard, but it seems like there's a lot of cut-off gear.

MICHAEL ATKIN: Matt Dell wants the fishing industry to move away from plastic gear.

MATT DELL: The bait box straps that wrap up the bait, they're plastic, they last a fair time in the environment and then they break up into lots of small pieces.

CLEAN-UP VOLUNTEER: A pretty large buoy that I guess has come off a fishing net.

MOSAKI KOYAMA: It's a big fishing head, I think. Pretty old.

MICHAEL ATKIN: After hours of painstaking collection, the rubbish is loaded onto inflatables and taken to another boat for counting.

MATT DELL: It actually starts building a picture of what's washing up on the beaches, how it's changing and sort of places that I can go looking to try and stop that rubbish ending up there. ...

... OK. So the grand total. Who guessed three grand? Simon nailed it. 2,999. And, yeah, probably the most unusual item on the beach, other than Claire's dice, was the axe head.

MICHAEL ATKIN: The problem with plastics is getting worse. Globally, every year, eight million tonnes of plastic enters the ocean.

MATT DELL: With total world plastic production doubling every 10 years, if we continue the way we're going, it's going to poison the ecosystem from the ground up, basically. It feels very satisfying at the end of the day to walk back along the beach that you've cleaned and not to have look down to actually appreciate it. Um, yeah, that's fantastic.

LEIGH SALES: Michael Atkin reporting.