Plastic pollution is recognized as a severe anthropogenic issue in coastal and marine ecosystems across the world. Sea turtles are affected by plastic during every stage of their life.
They crawl through the plastic on the way to the ocean as hatchlings, swim through it while migrating, confuse it for jellyfish (one of their favorite foods), and then crawl back through it as adults. Hundreds of thousands of sea turtles, whales, and other marine mammals, and more than 1 million seabirds die each year from ocean pollution and ingestion or entanglement in marine debris.