A bird nest that appears to have been made 30 years ago in Amsterdam is filled with historical plastics, demonstrating how far back plastic trash dates and still exists today.
Nest researcher Auke-Florian Hiemstra discovered the nest made from the Eurasian coot, a common bird in the Netherlands which can be found in all the canals of Amsterdam.
Hiemstra said the nest is made up of successive layers of plastic from different time periods, demonstrating how roughly 80 per cent of all the plastic ever produced still exists.
The birds traditionally don’t reuse their nest because they are built from fast decaying plant material, but in urban environments, these birds appear to be increasingly using plastic trash.
Since plastic does not break down, old nesting material is preserved. Layer upon layer, nest season after nest season, a plastic pile was built up.
“You flip through these nests, like through pages of a history book, uncovering the past,” said Hiemstra.
“The oldest layer is as old as me – all my life a bird was nesting here.”
Hiemstra dated plastic nest layers by looking at the expiry date found on plastic – some of them from the early 1990s.
One piece of plastic was a Mars packaging with an announcement of the 1994 FIFA World Cup in the USA. The upper layers of the nests contained recent face masks, a direct result of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Hiemstra said a significant proportion of the dateable waste materials from the nest were from fast food packaging, including polystyrene packaging from a McDonald’s McChicken, dating as far back as 1996, as well as recent fries sauce containers.
“The McDonald’s archaeology says something about throwaway culture and it shows that ‘away’ in throwaway, doesn’t actually mean anything,” he said
“The study highlights how animals unintentionally document our environmental problems. How we interact with our environment is reflected in the canals and quite literally woven into the nests of the birds that breed there.”
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