By Ryan Johnson

Stuff journalists Andrea Vance and Iain McGregor have just returned from a expedition to clean-up plastic from a remote uninhabited Pacific island. Will a New Zealand’s ban on grocery bags help tackle the world’s plastic pollution problem? 

Six tonnes of rubbish. 151 hours of hiking. And 351 man hours over 11 gruelling days.

Joining the expedition to clean-up a 2.25km of beach on the remote, South Pacific Henderson Island was physically demanding, eye-opening. And ultimately fruitless.

Everyday items, household name brands, fishing industry debris and broken shards of coloured, rigid plastics, were picked up, weighed and crammed into enormous orange sacks, neatly tied-up and hauled over the high-tide mark.

Since the 1990s, more pieces of plastic than you could ever count have been tossed up onto the beach by the powerful currents of the South Pacific Gyre.

It arrived on the tides from all corners of the globe. But the remote location, impassible coral reef and the violence of the seas around the island make it virtually impossible to retrieve.

The junk will remain on the beach until someone can mount – and finance – a final rescue mission, perhaps from a ship equipped with a helicopter.

And even if it is all eventually collected, within an estimated five years, more will have arrived to replace it.

Henderson’s East Beach is more than 5000km from both Peru and New Zealand. It lies close to Point Nemo: the point in the ocean that is farthest away from land.

No-one has lived there for more than five centuries. It takes six days to reach by plane and ship. Once you reach Henderson, it takes a demanding 90 minute hike to get onto the beach.

Only a few hundred people will ever step onto its coconut palm-fringed, coral sands. And if you are lucky enough to do so, it takes your breath away.

Instead of feeling cool sand between your toes, you notice the crunch of plastic underfoot.  It’s not the brilliantly turquoise waters that draw your eye, but the ankle-deep wave of trash that stretches in every direction.

Although we swept the beach clean of any rubbish larger than a bottle-cap, that represents only a tiny fraction of the pollution.

Buried deep in the sands are grains of micro and nano-plastics.  Sunlight and the pounding waves of the Pacific have worn them down to become part of the island. What isn’t ingested by Henderson’s wildlife will linger there for centuries.

Plastic is now so embedded in our environment that geologists have predicted it will be visible in fossil records millions of years from now.

That is the legacy of global consumption patterns of disposable plastics, a crisis that the world has only recently come alive to.

Last year, at a Wellington beach clean-up, Jacinda Ardern promised her Government would start to address our throwaway culture.

From Monday, it will be illegal for New Zealand’s retailers to give out plastic carrier bags. We each use, roughly, 154 plastic bags a year. The ban will take around 750 million out of circulation.

Our plastic binge is unceasing: packing consumption will quadruple by 2050 because it is cheap, convenient and makes our lives easier.

We already make over 300 million tonnes of plastics globally every year and about half of that is binned after being used only once. Less than a fifth is recycled.

But plastic isn’t the enemy and banning products alone won’t address the tidal wave.

Low-density polyethylene (LDPE) grocery-store bags actually have a lower environmental impact than the production of alternative carriers.

The solution is not simple and lies in a circular economy, where we keep lightweight, versatile and durable plastics in use for as long as possible: and then recycle or regenerate them.

That will take government investment in recycling collection and technology, better education on consumer behaviour, and incentives for manufacturers to develop durable alternatives.

Banning the bag was an easy PR win for Ardern. But without systematic change to the way we consume products and manage waste, it is a meaningless gesture.