29 Pollution Photos Showing What Plastic and Oil Do to Wildlife

Plastic and oil harm wildlife in two main ways: animals get tangled in or trapped by debris, and they swallow it or become coated in it. The photographs below show both, along with the places where waste builds up fastest, from riverbanks in Mumbai to a scrapyard in Accra. Together they explain why reducing what we throw away matters more than any single recycling bin.

The scale is larger than most people assume. A progress update from the Lancet Commission on Pollution and Health, published in 2022, linked pollution of all kinds to around 9 million human deaths a year, roughly one in six deaths worldwide, with air pollution the biggest single cause. Marine litter adds a separate toll on animals. On two remote islands alone, researchers estimated that about 570,000 hermit crabs had died after crawling into plastic containers they could not climb out of.

Some popular statistics are shakier. Claims that pollution kills "100 million mammals" every year have no solid study behind them, so we leave them out. What the evidence does show is plenty: entanglement, ingestion, oiled feathers, poisoned water and lost habitat. Each picture below comes with a short note on what it shows and why it matters, grouped by the kind of harm involved.

Why pictures like these work

Numbers about tonnes of plastic are hard to feel. A single turtle with a pinched shell is not. Conservation groups have long used photographs to make distant problems personal, and several of the images here have been reproduced in classrooms, campaigns and magazines for more than a decade.

That reach comes with a duty to be accurate. Some of these photos travelled online for years with wrong labels or no credit at all. Where we know the photographer, we name them. Where an image was only ever credited to a website, we say so. And where the original caption was wrong, for example calling a turtle a tortoise or a sea lion a seal, we correct it.

Caught, squeezed and trapped by plastic

Entanglement is the most visible kind of harm. Rings, straps, nets and fishing line do not break down for decades, and an animal that grows while caught in them can be deformed or slowly cut open.

A slider turtle with a drink-can ring

Photographer unknown

This is a freshwater slider turtle, not a tortoise as it was once labelled. A plastic six-pack ring has slipped over its shell. If a young turtle carries a ring like this for months, its shell keeps growing everywhere except under the band.

A snapping turtle with an hourglass shell

Photographer unknown

Here is what that growth looks like years later. A band around the middle of this snapping turtle forced its shell into a figure-of-eight. The best-known case of this kind is Peanut, a red-eared slider found in Missouri in the 1990s, who became a mascot for anti-litter campaigns. Turtles like these can survive, but the squeezed shell can crowd their organs and lungs.

A white stork wrapped in a plastic bag

Photographer unknown

White storks in Spain and Portugal increasingly feed at open rubbish dumps through the winter instead of flying to Africa. That steady food supply has a price. Thin plastic bags blow across the tips, and birds walking through them can end up wrapped like this one.

A sea lion with a deep neck wound

Ares Caius

The visible ear flaps show this is a sea lion rather than a true seal. The pale ring around its neck is a classic entanglement scar, usually left by a packing strap, a loop of net or monofilament line. As the animal grows, the loop cuts deeper, which is why rescue teams in California try to catch and free entangled sea lions early.

A seal with a plastic tub stuck on its snout

Photographer unknown

Curious seals push their noses into anything that smells of food. A rigid container like this can stop an animal from feeding or even breathing properly. Simple fixes help: rinse food containers before throwing them out, and keep bins on beaches and harbours closed.

A young raccoon with a fishing lure in its lip

Lost lures, hooks and tangled line are a common cause of injury to wild animals near lakes and rivers. This raccoon has a hard-bodied lure with treble hooks caught in its mouth. Anglers can help by taking snapped line home and by using barbless hooks where rules allow.

A hermit crab living in a glass bottle

Credited to animalnewsthepodcast.wordpress

Land hermit crabs need empty shells, and when shells are scarce they move into whatever they can find. A bottle can work as a home, but open containers become traps. In a 2019 study led by Jennifer Lavers, researchers counted crabs that had died inside beach debris on Henderson Island in the Pacific and the Cocos (Keeling) Islands in the Indian Ocean and estimated around 570,000 deaths in total.

A mute swan's nest built partly from rubbish

Wikimedia Commons

Swans build large mounds from whatever plant material is close to the water. In urban canals that now includes bags, wrappers and bottle tops. Chicks can get tangled in the strands, and soft plastic in a nest may also hold water and chill the eggs.

Plastic in the open ocean

Most plastic that reaches the sea does not stay in neat floating islands. It fragments, drifts with currents and ends up in the stomachs of animals that mistake it for food.

An albatross chick with a stomach full of plastic

Chris Jordan, from the series Midway: Message from the Gyre

This is one of the photographs Chris Jordan took on Midway Atoll, roughly 2,000 miles from any continent. Adult Laysan albatrosses skim the sea surface for food and pick up floating plastic, which they then feed to their chicks. Jordan did not arrange the fragments: as the bodies decayed, the lighters, bottle caps and shards were left where the stomach had been.

A plastic bag drifting off the Philippines

Keith A. Ellenbogen

Underwater photographer Keith Ellenbogen caught this bag hanging just below the surface. To a sea turtle, a pale bag moving in the current looks very much like a jellyfish, one of its natural foods. The Philippines is among the countries where large amounts of poorly managed plastic reach the sea, much of it in single-use sachets and bags.

Surfing a wave full of rubbish near Java

Zak Noyle

Hawaiian photographer Zak Noyle took this picture of the Indonesian surfer Dede Suryana while on assignment in 2012, off a remote island near Java. National Geographic later ran it as an example of how ocean litter reaches even remote surf spots. Java is the most populous island on Earth, and in the rainy season rivers carry large volumes of waste out to sea.

When oil reaches feathers

Oil harms a bird in a simple way: it mats the feathers, so they no longer trap air or keep water out. A soaked bird can quickly become too cold, too heavy to fly, and poisoned as it tries to preen itself clean.

A brown pelican in the 2010 Gulf of Mexico spill

Charlie Riedel / AP

Associated Press photographer Charlie Riedel took a series of images like this on Louisiana's coast in June 2010, after the Deepwater Horizon blowout. Over 87 days the well released more than 100 million gallons of oil, and on Queen Bess Island, a key pelican nesting site, more than 1,000 birds died. The brown pelican is Louisiana's state bird, and the island has since been rebuilt with money from the BP settlement.

Oiled African penguins

Jon Hrusa

South African photographer Jon Hrusa recorded penguins blackened by oil along the Western Cape coast. African penguins are endangered, and spills in their breeding waters, such as the sinking of the ore carrier Treasure near Cape Town in 2000, have forced huge volunteer rescue efforts. Cleaned birds often survive and breed again, which is why rapid response matters so much.

A heron lifted out of oily water

Photographer unknown

A rescuer holds up a wading bird whose feathers are clumped and dark with oil. Herons and egrets feed by standing in shallow water, so they meet oil that washes into marshes. Wildlife groups ask the public not to catch oiled birds themselves, because stress can kill them, but to report them to trained responders.

Lost habitat and poisoned water

A koala alone in cleared land

Published by The Guardian

This koala sits in the middle of a cleared plantation, with no trees left to climb or feed from. Land clearing, drought and bushfires have hit koala numbers hard. In 2022 the Australian government listed koalas in Queensland, New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory as endangered.

A frog in discoloured water

Credited to LiveIgnite

Frogs breathe partly through their thin skin, which makes them very sensitive to whatever is dissolved in the water around them. The oily, rust-coloured film in this pond is the kind of runoff that can come from roads, mines or industrial sites. Biologists often treat amphibians as an early warning sign that a wetland is in trouble.

Dead sea turtles on a beach in Tunisia

The Tunisian Ecocide Group

A Tunisian environmental group shared this picture of a sea turtle carcass on the shore, blaming chemical pollution. Strandings like this have several possible causes, including fishing nets, boat strikes and contamination, and only a post-mortem can say which. The Gulf of Gabès, on Tunisia's coast, has long been affected by waste from phosphate processing plants.

Where people live alongside the waste

Pollution is not only a wildlife problem. The heaviest burden falls on poorer neighbourhoods and countries, where waste collection is patchy and rubbish is burned, dumped or picked over by hand.

A boy collecting plastic to sell

Credited to George Steinmetz

This boy, wearing swimming goggles, gathers plastic from a shoreline covered with litter. Informal waste pickers around the world collect much of the plastic that does get recycled, often earning only a few cents per kilo. The stilt houses behind him show how close many families live to the waste they sort.

A child swimming among offerings and litter in India

Credited to Greenatom

Only the boy's head shows above water thick with marigold flowers, plastic bags and floating debris. Flowers and offerings are placed in rivers and the sea during Hindu festivals, and on busy days they mix with everyday rubbish. Cities in India now collect festival flowers separately to compost them or turn them into incense.

A child drinking from a polluted stream in Yunnan

Stringer

In Fuyuan County, in China's south-western Yunnan province, a child drinks from a bowl filled at a stream lined with litter. Unsafe water still causes widespread illness worldwide. Boiling, filtering or treating water reduces the risk, and anyone who becomes ill after drinking untreated water should talk to a doctor.

Mexico City stretching to the horizon

Credited to PopulationSpeakout

Houses cover every hillside in this aerial view of Mexico City, one of the largest metropolitan areas in the Americas with more than 20 million people. Big cities concentrate waste, traffic fumes and demand for water. Mexico City also sits in a high valley where air pollution can get trapped close to the ground.

Brick kiln chimneys and rubbish in Bangladesh

Credited to PopulationSpeakout

The tall chimneys in the background belong to brick kilns, and the ground in front is covered with plastic. Around Dhaka, thousands of kilns burn coal and wood during the dry season, and they are among the largest sources of the city's notoriously poor air.

Old electronics at Agbogbloshie, Accra

Credited to PopulationSpeakout

These broken computer monitors were piled up at Agbogbloshie, a scrapyard in Ghana's capital, Accra (sometimes misspelled "Acra"). Workers burned cables there to recover copper, releasing toxic smoke, and the site became known as one of the world's most polluted places. Much of the equipment came from richer countries as second-hand goods. The government bulldozed the yard in July 2021.

A dry riverbed in Bali choked with litter

Katie Pip

Between rains, this channel in Bali looks like a path through the forest, paved with plastic. When the wet season arrives, the water flushes everything downstream and onto beaches. Balinese volunteer clean-ups and a provincial ban on single-use bags, straws and polystyrene, introduced in 2019, grew out of exactly this problem.

A cat resting in litter

Nadine Kreation

A cat suns itself among bags and wrappers on a patch of sand, a scene the original credit placed in Morocco. Street animals often live off rubbish heaps, where they can eat plastic along with scraps. Morocco banned the production and sale of plastic bags in 2016, one of the first countries in Africa to do so.

A blackened river on the edge of Mumbai

Chirag Sutar

A suburban train runs past a river that has turned almost black, its banks lined with dumped waste. Many of Mumbai's smaller rivers now carry untreated sewage and industrial runoff for much of the year. Cleaning them depends on sewage treatment as much as on picking up litter.

Open dumping in a New Delhi street

Emma Valette

An older woman walks past a pile of waste spilling across a busy street while two men sweep beside a collection skip. Delhi produces thousands of tonnes of solid waste a day, and its huge landfill sites, such as Ghazipur, have grown into small mountains.

Bottles washed up by the Mekong in Laos

Raymond Richards

Plastic bottles and driftwood have piled up on the rocks below a stretch of rapids on the Mekong. The river flows through six countries and supports one of the world's largest freshwater fisheries. Plastic carried by large Asian rivers like this one makes up a significant share of what reaches the ocean.

Beijing hidden in smog

ChinaFotoPress

High-rise towers poke out of a thick grey haze in this image of Beijing. Pictures like it became symbols of the city's air pollution crisis in the early 2010s. After a national air pollution action plan began in 2013, Beijing's fine particle levels fell sharply, which shows that firm policy can clear the air within a decade.

What actually makes a difference

Recycling helps, but it is the last step, not the first. According to the OECD, only about 9% of plastic waste worldwide is recycled. The rest is burned, buried or leaks into the environment. So the order of priorities is worth remembering: use less, reuse what you can, and recycle what is left.

• Cut single-use plastic where it is easy. A refillable bottle, a cloth bag and a lunch box remove dozens of items a month.
• Snip loops before binning them. Snip six-pack rings, masks and elastic bands, and keep lids on bins outdoors.
• Take fishing line and hooks home. Many harbours and lakes have special collection tubes for old line.
• Join a local clean-up. Beach and river clean-ups also produce data that researchers use to track where litter comes from.
• Report injured or oiled wildlife. Call a local rescue group rather than handling the animal yourself.
• Support better systems. Deposit-return schemes, proper waste collection and producer responsibility laws prevent far more litter than individual effort alone.

None of the scenes above is inevitable. Clean-ups in Bali, the rebuilt pelican island in Louisiana and Beijing's clearer skies all show that places can recover when people decide they should.

Sources: AQLI on the Lancet Commission pollution update; IMAS, University of Tasmania, on hermit crab deaths; Brown University, Chris Jordan: Message from the Gyre; National Geographic on Zak Noyle's photograph; AP on Queen Bess Island; Citi Newsroom on Agbogbloshie; photo collection compiled by True Activist.

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