About 50 tonnes of plastic waste have spread over ten kilometers of this 120 km long beach on the Bay of Bengal in the south-east of the country. It is the first time, according to the Bangladeshi Department of Forests, that such a quantity of plastic has been brought back by sea to this beach.
"This is a unique case of plastics invasion" and it is "a signal of great danger to marine biodiversity," said Moazzem Hossain, a manager of a local environmental organization , Save the Nature Bangladesh. The annual amount of waste from ships and surrounding countries that floats in the Bay of Bengal is usually around 26 tonnes, he said.
Residents observed waves on Saturday evening carrying plastic bottles, fishing nets and buoys. Sunday morning, they found turtle carcasses on the sand.
"Hundreds of residents have rushed to the beach since early this morning to save the injured turtles" trapped in the trash, said a spokesman for the forestry department, Sohail Hossain. "We have buried the dead turtles and are trying to release the rescued ones."
Volunteers from Plastik Bank Bangladesh found and buried about twenty olive ridley turtles, a species classified as vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
"I have never seen so many dead turtles on the beach or so much plastic waste floating on the shore in my life," fisherman Jashim Uddin told AFP.
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Most of the turtles were at least 30 years old, said a Bangladeshi specialist from the NGO Creative Coservation Alliance, Shahriar Caesar Rahman. "Turtles are often trapped in huge masses of garbage that float in the sea and eventually die suffocated. This seems to have been the case," he told AFP.
Local authorities have indicated that they are investigating the incident.